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Egg and Bread-crumbs (Half pint of Brown Sauce)
Half pint of Brown Sauce.
Macédoine to garnish.
Cook the veal carefully until done, about one and a half hours. Then pull out the bones, and press itflat. When cold trim into cutlet-shaped pieces. Cover each piece with liver-farce, and then with Béchamel. Egg and crumb carefully, and fry in sufficient fat to cover. Arrange the tendrons in a circle, pour the brown sauce round, and place the macédoine in the centre.
Tête de Veau en Tortue.
Ingredients.
This is the tail end of a recipe for tendrons de veau — veal rib tips cooked, pressed, coated and fried — and the page runs straight into the ingredient heading for the next dish. The ingredient list for the veal itself is missing, so treat what follows as method rather than a complete formula.
- What tendrons areTendrons are the cartilaginous rib tips from a breast of veal, cut across so each piece carries a band of soft gristle that turns gelatinous with long cooking. A butcher will need to be asked for breast of veal, bone in; the cut is not usually on display.
- The hinge: press it coldEverything after the cooking depends on the meat being weighted flat and chilled through. Warm or loosely pressed veal will not trim into clean cutlet shapes and the coatings will slide off in the fat. Press between two trays with a few tins on top and refrigerate until thoroughly cold.
- Béchamel as a coating, not a sauceThe béchamel here must be a very thick, cold panade — reduced hard, spread on in a thin layer and set firm in the refrigerator before crumbing. A pouring béchamel will simply run.
- Liver-farceA forcemeat of calf's or chicken liver pounded with fat bacon, breadcrumbs or panada, egg and seasoning. Modern cooks can use a firm chicken-liver parfait mixture, cooked and chilled, spread thinly.
- Egg and crumbFlour lightly, then beaten egg, then fine dry white crumbs, pressing them on and resting the pieces half an hour before frying so the crust adheres.
- Frying temperature"Sufficient fat to cover" means deep frying. Hold the fat at 350-360F: the interior is already cooked, so the object is colour and a set crust in three or four minutes, no more.
- Brown sauceHalf a pint is 10 fl oz in British measure, about 1 1/4 US cups. In books of this period brown sauce generally means a brown roux-and-stock sauce of the espagnole or demi-glace family.
- MacédoineA neat dice of mixed vegetables — carrot, turnip, French beans, peas — cooked separately so each keeps its colour, then bound with a little butter and piled in the centre of the ring of tendrons.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities or yield. A breast of veal might reasonably produce somewhere around eight to ten trimmed tendrons, which would suit a Victorian entrée — one course among several.
Tendrons de veau belong to the middle of the classical French repertoire that late-Victorian British cookery schools taught to cooks bound for large households. The technique on show — braise, press cold, mask with a stiff sauce, crumb, deep fry — belongs to the same family as the cutlet dishes of the period, the masking with a stiff sauce before crumbing being properly the Villeroi treatment, and it exists because it turns a cheap, gelatinous cut into something that can be arranged in a formal circle with a garnish in the centre. That arrangement, entrée in a ring with the garnish inside and the sauce poured round rather than over, appears to have been usual service of the period; a macédoine, whose name is traditionally said to come from the mixed nations of Alexander's empire though the derivation is a folk explanation rather than a documented etymology, was among the filings one would expect for the well. The fragment ends mid-page on the heading for tête de veau en tortue, another dish of the same school, which gives a fair idea of how far such books expected a cook to work with offal and long-cooked cuts.