Veal Salad
Use a nice firm piece of a leg of veal, roasted. Cut in small cubes and treat in exactly the same way as chicken salad.
A two-line recipe that leans entirely on the chicken salad entry alongside it: cold roast meat in cubes, celery, and a boiled or mayonnaise dressing. What it does not say is what matters most.
- Roast the veal first, and cool it fullyThe meat goes into the bowl cold and firm. Roast a boneless leg (top round or sirloin tip of veal) to about 145F, rest it, then chill several hours before cubing — warm veal shreds and crumbles under the knife.
- "A nice firm piece of a leg"Veal leg is sold today as cutlet, top round or rump roast. Ask for a solid 2-3 lb boneless piece rather than a rolled and tied roast, which falls apart along the seams when cubed. Shoulder is too loose for this.
- Cube sizeHalf-inch dice. Larger and the pieces read as leftovers; smaller and the salad turns to paste once dressed.
- What "the same way as chicken salad" meant in 1911Typically roughly equal parts diced meat and diced celery, bound with mayonnaise or a cooked dressing, seasoned with salt, pepper and a little lemon, and served on lettuce. Hard-boiled egg is sometimes added. Follow whatever the book's own chicken salad entry specifies.
- The dressingVeal is blander and drier than chicken, so it wants a sharper bind — more lemon or vinegar than you would use with poultry, and a little of the roasting juices or a spoonful of cream loosened into the mayonnaise.
- Dress lateCombine meat and celery and refrigerate, but fold in the dressing within an hour of serving. Veal absorbs mayonnaise and goes heavy if it sits dressed overnight.
- YieldA 2 lb roast, cubed, with an equal volume of celery, serves six to eight as a lunch salad.
- KeepingThis is a cold protein salad. Serve it cold, keep it refrigerated, and eat it within two days.
Good Things to Eat (1911) was written by Rufus Estes, born enslaved in Tennessee in 1857, who cooked in Chicago restaurants, spent years as a Pullman dining-car chef serving private railroad cars, and later ran the kitchen at the subsidiary of a Chicago steel company. Cross-references like this one are typical of the book's economy: rather than reprint the chicken salad method for a second meat, Estes simply points back to it. Veal salad belongs to the era's large family of cold "made dishes" — sweetbread salad, lobster salad, ham salad — built on cooked protein, celery and mayonnaise. Veal itself was far more common on American tables then than now, cheap enough to roast plainly and good enough cold, and cold sliced or diced roast veal is one of the recurring workhorses of period cookbooks.