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CHAPTER XLIV: Place
Place in the bottom of a baking pan 2 slices salt pork cut fine, a layer of sliced potatoes, a little chopped onion, a layer of finely chopped uncooked veal, pepper, and salt. Continue until the dish is full. Spread over the top bits of butter. Bake forty-five minutes.
Veal Stew. 3 pounds breast veal, 3 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, Bunch parsley, 2 carrots, 2 cupfuls cooked green peas.
Cut up the veal and fry light brown in a pan with the butter; drain off most of the butter; sprinkle the flour over the meat; mix well and fry a little longer, add 1 pint water and let boil; take out the meat, put it in another pan, strain the sauce over it.
Add the parsley chopped fine, carrots cut fine, and peas. Boil up again, and serve.
Veal Collops (Scotch recipe). 1½ pounds veal, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 tablespoonful chopped onion, 2 cupfuls stock, 1 can green peas, Salt and pepper.
Trim off skin and fat from the veal and put through a meat chopper.
Melt the butter and brown the onion, then add the stock; season to taste and simmer five minutes. Fry the chopped raw meat in a spider. Stir until the butter is absorbed; strain over it the stock in the saucepan; cover, simmer for twenty minutes, stirring occasionally. Place the peas in a saucepan with butter, salt, and pepper, and heat. When the meat has absorbed the liquor, turn it into the center of a hot platter; sprinkle with finely chopped parsley and sur round with the peas.
Calves' Tongue with Tomato Sauce, 2 calves' tongues, 1 tablespoonful flour, 1 cupful water, 4 tablespoonfuls vinegar 1 bunch parsley, 1 onion, 3 cloves.
Soak the tongues in warm water an hour; drain and parboil, cool, pare, and scrape off the white skin. Put the flour in a saucepan, stir into it gradually the water. When it boils, add the tongues with vinegar, parsley, VEAL onion, and cloves. Cover and cook rot, bay leaf, salt, stock, and tomaslowly an hour. Serve with tomato sauce.
Four veal dishes run together here, none of them difficult, but several of the instructions assume a cook who already knows what the book leaves out — chiefly oven heat and pan choice.
- Oven heat for the layered panThe first recipe gives no temperature and does not say whether to cover the pan. An uncovered dish of raw veal, sliced potato and salt pork will want something like a moderate oven, and forty-five minutes will only be enough if the potatoes are sliced thin; otherwise allow longer, until a knife goes through the potato without resistance.
- SpiderA spider is a cast-iron frying pan, originally one with legs for hearth cooking. Any heavy skillet does the same work; the point is a pan that holds heat while chopped meat browns rather than steams.
- Salt porkSalt pork is fatty cured belly or fatback, sold in slabs and much saltier than bacon. Two slices cut fine will season the whole pan, so hold back on the added salt until the dish is nearly done. Unsmoked pancetta is the closest common substitute; bacon works but brings smoke the original does not intend.
- Collops, mincedA collop is properly a thin slice of meat, and Scottish cookery distinguishes plain collops from minced collops. What is given here is the minced version — the veal goes through the chopper — so expect a soft mince heaped in the centre of the platter, not cutlets.
- Canned peas"1 can green peas" and "2 cupfuls cooked green peas" both mean the soft, fully cooked peas of the period. Frozen peas need two or three minutes only; adding them at the start of a boil-up will turn them grey.
- Calves' tongue timingThe recipe soaks the tongues an hour in warm water, parboils them for an unstated time, then cooks them slowly for an hour; tongue is a working muscle full of connective tissue and may well want longer. Test with a skewer at the thick end; if it meets resistance, keep going. Note that the recipe has you cool the tongues before paring, though the white outer skin generally comes away more easily while they are still warm.
- The vinegarFour tablespoonfuls of vinegar in a cupful of water makes a sharp braising liquor, evidently deliberately, cutting the richness of the tongue. A cider or white wine vinegar will give a rounder result than distilled.
- YieldsNone of the recipes states a yield. Roughly, the layered pan and the stew should each do for about four; the collops, from a pound and a half of veal, for three or four; two calves' tongues, sliced thin, for four or so.
Veal dominates this stretch of the book because in the American household economy of the period it was cheap, plentiful and mild — dairy herds produced surplus bull calves, and the breast, tongue and trimmings sold for a fraction of the price of beef. The recipes reflect that thrift: nothing here uses a prime cut, and each dish stretches the meat with potatoes, peas or a flour-thickened sauce. The Scotch attribution on the collops points to a genuinely old British form, generally traced to the seventeenth century, where collop meant a slice cut for quick frying; minced collops became the everyday Scottish version, and the dish survives in Scotland still as mince served with peas. Calves' tongue with a sharp sauce belongs to the same tradition of using every part of the animal, and appeared on middle-class tables far more often then than now.