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Salt, Pepper and Breadcrumbs
Trim the veal; cut it into eight even-sized scollops; beat them with a cutlet-bat, and shape neatly.
Put two ounces of butter in a sauté-pan; when hot put in the scollops, and fry over a quick fire a nice light brown colour. As the meat will afterwards be cooked again, the frying process should be done quickly, without actually cooking the scollops or cutlets. Place them between two boards; put a weight, not too heavy, on the top, and keep thus until cold. Strain the butter and keep for further use.
Cut the pork and marrow into small pieces; pound in a mortar; when fine add the anchovy paste, savoury herbs, yolk of an egg, and a small piece of butter about the size of a nutmeg. Pound thoroughly till smooth. Season with pepper and salt; rub through a fine sieve, and cover each side of each scollop thickly with this farce.
Put them on a buttered baking-sheet; cover over with a few fried breadcrumbs sprinkled with oiled butter, and place in a hot oven for about ten minutes.
If preserved mushrooms are used, drain them well; sauté them in a little butter, season with salt and pepper, add the demi-glace sauce, and cook for ten minutes.
Dish up the scollops in a circle on a hot round dish, and put the ragout of mushrooms in the centre.
Filets de Bœuf, piqué à la Brillat. (Fillets of Beef, larded à la Brillat.) Ingredients.
Middle cut of Fillet (about four pounds).
One large Truffle.
One glass of Sherry.
One small Carrot.
One small Turnip.
One small Onion.
This is a set of instructions for veal scollops masked in a pounded forcemeat and finished in the oven, served with a mushroom ragout. The page as printed runs straight on into the next recipe, and the ingredient list for this one has been lost above the method, so quantities have to be inferred.
- Missing ingredient listApart from the two ounces of butter for frying and the nutmeg-sized piece for the farce, the printed quantities are lost. For eight scollops a workable farce might be about 3 oz fat salt pork, 2 oz beef marrow, a teaspoon of anchovy paste, a tablespoon of chopped parsley and thyme, one egg yolk and about half an ounce of butter; the weight of veal is a guess.
- ScollopsEscalopes, not shellfish. Cut across the grain from the leg or loin and beaten thin between sheets of plastic; a cutlet-bat is a flat, heavy mallet, and the flat side of a meat pounder does the same job without tearing the fibres.
- Quick fire, hot oven"A quick fire" means the pan is hot enough to colour the meat in under a minute a side. "A hot oven" here is 425-450F. The point of the first frying is colour only, so keep the pan hot and the time short.
- Pressing between boardsWeighting the fried scollops until cold sets them flat and firm so the farce will stay put. An hour in the refrigerator under a plate and a couple of tins is enough; do not use a weight heavy enough to squeeze out the juices.
- The farceMarrow must be ordered from a butcher and scooped from split bones. "Pork" in this context is fat salt pork or unsmoked belly. A food processor replaces the mortar, but still push the mixture through a sieve afterwards -- the smooth, close texture is what lets it cling to the meat.
- Raw pork in the coatingTen minutes at 425F cooks a thin mask, not a thick one. Spread it no more than a quarter-inch deep on each side and check that the centre reaches 160F before serving.
- Oiled butter and fried crumbsOiled butter is simply melted butter, ideally clarified so the milk solids do not scorch. The crumbs should be fried golden beforehand, since the short oven time will not brown them.
- Preserved mushrooms and demi-glacePreserved mushrooms were bottled or tinned button mushrooms; fresh ones sautéed until their liquid has gone work as well. Demi-glace here means a reduced brown sauce -- about half a cup, reduced from good veal or beef stock, should be enough for the centre of the dish.
- YieldEight scollops serves four as a main course, or eight as one course of a longer dinner in the style the book assumes.
Veal escalopes masked in a pounded forcemeat and glazed under crumbs belong to the French repertoire that British cookery schools taught to household cooks and professional chefs alike around the turn of the twentieth century, when a "high class" dinner in an English dining room was expected to carry French names and French method. The farce here is an old construction: fat pork and beef marrow pounded to a paste for richness, anchovy for the salt-savoury depth that English kitchens had used in meat cookery since the eighteenth century, and an egg yolk to bind it so it sets in the oven rather than sliding off. Beef marrow was cheap and universally available while butchers broke down whole carcasses in the shop, which may go some way to explaining why it appears so casually in books of this date and so rarely now. The recipe that begins at the foot of the page, filets de bœuf piqué à la Brillat, nods to Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, whose name was attached to a good many nineteenth-century garnishes well after his death.