Bewitched Veal
3 pounds of veal cutlet ¼ pound of ham 1 tablespoonful of onion ¼ teaspoonful of grated juice nutmeg 1 teaspoonful of salt I large tablespoonful of 3 eggs butter 1 gill of cream Chop the meat very fine. Beat the eggs. Mix all the ingredients together and finish the same as Veal Loaf. Serve in thin slices around a bed of lettuce.
A cold veal loaf, baked and then chilled so it can be sliced thin — the sort of dish this book offers as an alternative to hot roast meat in July. The original leans on a Veal Loaf recipe printed elsewhere in the book, so a few numbers have to be supplied.
- The garbled quantitiesRead them as 1/4 pound of ham, 1 tablespoonful of onion juice, 1/4 teaspoonful of grated nutmeg, 1 teaspoonful of salt, 1 large tablespoonful of butter, 3 eggs and 1 gill of cream. The ham is a seasoning, not a filling.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. Heavy cream gives the firmest slice; light cream or half-and-half makes a softer loaf that crumbles when cut cold.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and use the liquid and pulp that collect. It seasons without leaving raw onion pieces that would show in a thin slice.
- Chop the meat very fineAsk the butcher to grind the veal and ham together, or pulse cubed cold meat in a food processor. Veal is lean, so do not trim away all the fat — the butter and cream are the only thing keeping the loaf from turning dry and mealy.
- Oven and timeThe original says only to 'finish the same as Veal Loaf', so the numbers have to be supplied: pack into a buttered loaf pan and bake in a moderate oven, taken today as about 350F. Three pounds of meat will likely need roughly an hour and a quarter; the recipe gives neither temperature nor time.
- Cook it throughGround veal with raw egg through it should reach 160F at the centre on an instant-read thermometer. A loaf meant to be eaten cold gets no second chance at heat, so check rather than guess.
- Chilling is part of the recipeChilling -- Serving in thin slices around lettuce implies a cold loaf, though the original does not say so. Cool it in its pan, then refrigerate several hours or overnight, under a light weight if you like; warm, it will not slice thin.
- YieldThree pounds of meat makes a substantial loaf — eight to ten servings as a cold main course with the lettuce, more if it is one dish on a summer table.
Cold spiced meat loaves, sliced thin and served on greens, were a fixture of late nineteenth-century American summer cookery, when a hot range in an unventilated kitchen was something to be used once and then avoided. Books of "hot weather dishes" from this period are built around exactly that logic: cook in the cool of the morning, serve cold at noon or evening. Veal was a common choice for the purpose, its mild flavour and gelatinous quality setting into a firm, pale slice that held together without added aspic. The name looks like decoration rather than description — fanciful titles (bewitched, mock, devilled, surprise) turn up often in period recipe books — and the method here is simply a veal loaf enriched with ham, cream and nutmeg.