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Cooking of True Proteids Continued: Meat: Serve
BOILED LAMB Wipe the meat with a damp cloth, cover with boiling water, let boil five or six minutes, then simmer about three hours. Serve with caper sauce, boiled turnips, cauliflower or spinach, and potatoes.
SPANISH VEAL BALLS, EN CASSEROLE About 1½ lbs. of veal (cutlet, 1/2 teaspoonful of paprika from leg) 1 teaspoonful of parsley (fine 1/4 cup of fat, salt pork or chopped) bacon 1 1/2 cups of cooked tomatoes 1/2 cup of fine, soft bread 1/2 teaspoonful of salt crumbs A slice of green or red pepper, 1 egg, well-beaten chopped fine 1/2 teaspoonful of salt Chop the veal, freed from skin, etc., and the pork very fine, add the other ingredients and mix all together thoroughly, then shape into balls by rolling portions of the mixture in the hands. Make about six balls. Roll the balls in flour, then saute them in a little salt pork fat made hot in a frying pan. Heat about a cup and a half of canned tomatoes and turn into a casserole. Add the salt and chopped pepper, put in the veal balls, rinse out the frying pan with a spoonful of the tomato juice and pour into the casserole. Cover and let cook in a moderate oven an hour or more. Serve from the casserole, or from a platter, with a sprig of parsley in the top of each ball. Beef (from the round) may be prepared in the same way. Also a pound of veal steak or beef steak from the round, cut in pieces two inches square, may be browned and cooked with the tomatoes in the casserole. In this case two hours' cooking will be needed. The tomato may be strained, if desired, before it is set to cook.
CALF'S LIVER, HASHED Cut from half to a whole pound of calf's liver into slices and pour over it boiling water to cover; let stand five or six minutes, then drain, wipe on a cloth and chop fine. Melt a tablespoonful of butter in a saucepan, put in the hashed liver, cover and let simmer very gently about one hour, stirring occasionally. Then add a dash of paprika, half a teaspoonful of salt and two or three tablespoonfuls of hot water or broth and serve when mixed thoroughly. Serve on rounds of buttered toast or with baked potatoes. BREAST OF FOWL (ONE YEAR) EN CASSEROLE With a sharp knife cut the breast, entire, from a fowl a year old and leave the rest of the flesh intact Have three or four tablespoonfuls of salt pork or bacon fat, butter or vegetable oil in a frying pan; when hot cook the breast over a brisk fire on the skin side until slightly browned, then set into an earthen dish; add about a dozen slices of carrot and an equal number of celery and pour in boiling water to half cover the chicken; put on the cover of the dish and let boil five or six minutes, then set to cook in a moderate oven for about two hours. Allow plenty of time for cooking, as the chicken may be kept hot in the dish after it is cooked enough. Renew the water as needed and add salt and pepper when about half cooked. Serve from the dish, or dispose the chicken on a platter with the vegetables around it.
Four related dishes from a two-person cookbook, all built on long, gentle cooking in a covered pot. A few of the timings belong to an era of older, tougher meat and can be shortened considerably.
- The veal ball ingredients, sorted outThe list reads: about 1 1/2 lb veal (cutlet or leg), 1/4 cup fat from salt pork or bacon, 1 1/2 cups cooked tomatoes, 1/2 cup fine soft bread crumbs, 1 egg well beaten, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp paprika, 1 tsp finely chopped parsley, and a slice of green or red pepper chopped fine. The second 1/2 teaspoonful of salt is the seasoning added to the tomatoes in the casserole, not to the meat.
- "Casserole" hereIn this book a casserole is a lidded earthenware baking dish that goes from oven to table, which is why the instruction is to serve from it. Any covered Dutch oven or lidded braiser works; the point is the tight lid, since there is very little liquid.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is 350F. For the two-hour breast of fowl and the longer beef variation, 325F is safer against drying out.
- Chopping veal at homeThe veal and salt pork are meant to be chopped fine by hand or run through a grinder, not pureed. A food processor pulsed a few times gives the right coarse texture; taken further the balls turn dense and rubbery.
- Calf's liver, hashedAn hour of simmering will give you grey, granular liver. Liver is protein that sets at low heat and toughens quickly; chopped liver of this kind needs five to ten minutes over gentle heat, until it has just lost its raw colour. The recipe's opening pour of boiling water seems intended to firm the slices for chopping, and can be skipped if the liver is cold and fresh.
- A fowl one year oldThis is a stewing hen or boiling fowl, an older laying bird with tough, well-flavoured flesh that wants two hours of moist heat. A supermarket broiler breast will be dry ruin at that length. Buy an actual stewing hen if you can find one, or substitute bone-in chicken thighs and cut the oven time to about 45 minutes.
- Boiled lambThree hours suits a large shoulder or leg from an older animal. A modern 3 lb boneless shoulder is tender at about 1 1/2 to 2 hours of bare simmering; test with a fork rather than the clock. Keep the water at a shiver, never a rolling boil, or the outside shreds before the centre gives.
- Caper sauceThe book assumes you know it: conventionally a white sauce made with some of the lamb cooking liquid in place of part of the milk, finished with drained capers and a little of their vinegar. The acid cuts the fat of the boiled meat, so do not skip it.
- YieldSix veal balls, half to a whole pound of liver, or one fowl breast each serve two with vegetables, which is the scale the whole book is written to.
Cooking for Two belongs to a small run of early twentieth-century American books written for the newly common small household: young couples in flats, without a cook, buying meat in one- and two-pound lots rather than by the joint. The chapter heading, "Cooking of True Proteids," is a fingerprint of the domestic science movement, which reorganised the cookbook around the nutritional categories then being taught in schools and colleges rather than around courses or occasions. That framing explains the oddity of finding boiled lamb, veal balls, hashed liver and a stewed fowl breast on one page: what unites them is not the meal but the protein. The recipes themselves are thrift writing. A fowl a year old was the cheap end of the poultry market, and the instruction to take the breast off whole and "leave the rest of the flesh intact" suggests getting more than one meal from a single bird. The Spanish veal balls presumably take their name from the paprika and sweet pepper.