Home › The Principles of Cookery › Veal, with Macaroni
Veal, with Macaroni
Take two pounds of any lean part of veal, chop finely, and season well with pepper and salt. Fry two small onions until brown, and whilst they are cooking boil until tender two sticks of macaroni broken into inch lengths. Mix all together, adding a table-spoonful of tomato sauce, and turn the whole into a pie-dish. Cover with bread-crumbs, place some small pieces of butter over, and bake in a moderate oven for an hour.
A plain Victorian supper dish of minced veal baked under a crumb crust. Two details need attention before you start: the vague macaroni measure, and the fact that raw minced meat is going into the dish without browning.
- "Two sticks of macaroni"This means two of the long, straight, hollow tubes in which macaroni was then sold, not two boxes. What that weighs is guesswork today; a few ounces of dry short macaroni is a reasonable modern stand-in against 2 lb of meat.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). An hour at that temperature is right for the depth of a standard pie dish.
- Chop finelyMinced veal from the butcher does the job. If you are chopping shoulder or breast yourself, keep it coarse enough to have some texture rather than reducing it to paste.
- The meat goes in rawNothing here is browned but the onions, so the dish depends entirely on the oven. Spread it no more than about two inches deep and check that the centre reaches 160F (71C) before serving.
- It will want moistureTwo pounds of lean veal, boiled macaroni and a single spoonful of sauce is a dry mixture. A teacupful of stock or the macaroni water stirred through before baking keeps it from setting into a brick.
- Tomato sauceA cooked, seasoned tomato sauce, not modern bottled ketchup, which is much sweeter and more acidic.
- Frying the onionsButter, dripping or lard. Brown them properly rather than merely softening them, since they are carrying most of the savour.
- YieldServes four to six as a main course with a green vegetable or salad.
Cassell's is often said to have addressed households running on one servant or none, and this is a characteristic economy dish: a cheap lean cut, extended with pasta, bound with a spoonful of sauce and finished with crumbs and butter so it comes to the table looking like something more considered. Veal was far commoner in British kitchens then than now, though whether its coarser cuts counted as cheap is arguable, veal often being reckoned a dearer meat. Macaroni had been in English cookery since the eighteenth century, when it arrived as an expensive Italian novelty, but by the later Victorian period it was an ordinary storecupboard dry good, and books of this period use it much as they use rice, to bulk out meat rather than as a dish in its own right.