Marbled Veal
Chop very fine one salt boiled beef's tongue, also two pounds of cold cooked veal. Season both with pepper, nutmeg, and the veal with salt. Pack in layers in small cups, pressing very hard. Stand aside until cold. Turn out on lettuce leaves. Serve with sauce Tartare.
A cold pressed meat for hot weather, built entirely from leftovers. The whole dish depends on the pressing and the chilling, so plan for several hours in the refrigerator before you need it.
- The hinge: press hard, chill coldThere is no binder here beyond the gelatin and fat already in the tongue and veal, so compression is what holds the loaf together. Pack in firmly with the back of a spoon, cover with plastic, set a small weight on top and refrigerate at least four hours or overnight. "Stand aside until cold" meant a cool larder; use the refrigerator.
- Salt boiled tongueA cured (pickled) beef tongue, simmered until tender, peeled while warm and cooled under a weight. Raw beef tongues commonly run 2 to 4 lb and shrink appreciably in cooking; the recipe calls for one whole tongue. Ready-cooked cured tongue from a deli works and is far quicker.
- Chop, do not processA food processor turns both meats to paste and destroys the marbling the name promises. Chop by hand with a heavy knife to a coarse mince, and keep the two meats in separate bowls until they go into the cups.
- Getting the marblingLayer alternately and thinly — pink tongue, pale veal, four or five layers per cup — and resist stirring. The cut face is the point of the dish.
- Seasoning amountsThe original gives none. For 2 lb of veal plus tongue, start with about a teaspoon of salt in the veal only (the tongue is already salty), a generous half teaspoon of black pepper across both, and about a quarter teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg.
- "Small cups"Teacups of the period were small, commonly somewhere in the region of 4 to 6 oz. Ramekins, dariole moulds or straight-sided glasses do the same job. Line them with plastic wrap so they turn out cleanly; dipping the base in warm water for a few seconds also helps.
- Sauce Tartare, 1900 senseSauce Tartare, period sense -- Mayonnaise sharpened with chopped capers, gherkins, shallot or onion, and parsley or tarragon -- no relish. Make it thick enough to sit beside the loaf rather than run under it.
- YieldA whole tongue plus 2 lb of veal is a good deal of meat; expect closer to eight to ten small moulds, each a lunch or supper portion with lettuce and bread.
- KeepingCooked meat chopped fine has a great deal of exposed surface. Eat within two days, keep it refrigerated until it goes to the table, and do not leave the moulds standing out on a warm day.
Marbled or potted meats belong to a long British and American tradition of using up cold roasts by pounding them fine, seasoning them heavily and pressing them into a shape that could be sliced — the same logic as potted beef, veal loaf and the pressed tongue served at Victorian cold suppers. The "marbling" is the visual trick: cured tongue stays pink while cooked veal goes pale, so alternating layers cut to a mottled face. The dish belongs to warm-weather cooking, and that goes a long way toward explaining its existence. Cooking in July meant heating a kitchen with a coal or wood range, and a cook who had boiled a tongue and cooked a piece of veal in the cool of one morning could get two or three cold meals out of them without lighting the fire again. Sauce tartare, a cold mayonnaise derivative in the Franco-American repertoire, was one accompaniment to such pressed meats served on lettuce.