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Some Kitchen Kinks: Veal
Veal Loaf. 3 pounds veal. 1 pound salt pork. 6 soda crackers rolled fine. 3 eggs well beaten. 1/4 teaspoonful pepper. ½ teaspoonful salt.
Chop the meat mixed with the other ingredients, shape, and bake three hours, basting occasionally with pork fat. Use one-fourth cut of fat for this purpose. If the roll is pierced occasionally the fat will penetrate more effectually. Veal loaf may also be cooked in bread pans.
Some persons cook the veal before chopping.
DEVELOPING AND IMPROVING FLAVOR OF MEAT The typical meat flavors are very palatable to most persons, even when they are constantly tasted, and consequently the better cuts of meat in which they are well developed can be cooked and served without attention being paid especially to flavor. Careful cooking aids in developing the natural flavor of some of the cheaper cuts, and such a result is to be sought wherever it is possible.
Browning also brings out flavors agreeable to most palates. Aside from these two ways of increasing the flavor of the meat itself there are countless ways of adding flavor to otherwise rather tasteless meats.
The flavors may be added in preparing the meat for cooking, as in various seasoned dishes already described, or they may be supplied to cooked meat in the form of sauces.
A plain American veal loaf, given without an oven temperature and with a roasting time that belongs to a much cooler range than most modern ovens. The rest translates cleanly.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was usual when the writer assumed a range the cook already knew. A moderate oven, 325-350F, suits a dense meat loaf; anything hotter will set and crack the outside long before the centre is done.
- Three hours is too longThree hours is long -- a four-pound free-form roll will usually reach 160F well before that, roughly one and a half to two hours at 350F depending on its shape and thickness. Cook to temperature with a probe rather than to the clock; a full three hours is likely to leave the loaf dry.
- Do not pierce itThe instruction to prick the roll so fat penetrates works the other way round in practice: the holes let juices out. Baste the surface if you like, but leave the loaf intact.
- Soda crackersThese are the plain saltine-type cracker. Six rolled fine come to somewhere between a quarter and half a cup of crumbs depending on the size of the cracker, a light binder for three pounds of meat; unseasoned dry breadcrumbs substitute directly.
- Salt pork and seasoningA pound of salt pork to three pounds of veal supplies most of the salt, which is why only half a teaspoon is added. If your pork is lightly cured, or if you substitute unsmoked bacon or fatback, taste a fried spoonful of the mixture and adjust before shaping.
- "One-fourth cut of fat"This phrase is genuinely unclear in the original. It most plausibly means reserving a quarter of the salt pork, unchopped, to render for basting fat, but it will not bear a firm conversion.
- ChoppingHand-chopping with a knife or a food chopper gives a coarse, open texture. A grinder on the coarse plate, or short pulses in a processor, reproduces it; a fine grind turns the loaf pasty. Chill the veal and pork well before grinding.
- Cooking the veal firstThe recipe records only that some persons cook the veal before chopping. Pre-cooked meat would give a firmer, drier loaf, of the kind often pressed and sliced cold; raw meat gives the moister hot version.
- YieldFour pounds of meat serves ten to twelve. The loaf slices best after resting 20 minutes hot, or chilled overnight under a weight if it is to be served cold.
"Kinks" here means tricks or knacks, a common turn of phrase in early twentieth-century household manuals that collected shortcuts from experienced cooks. Veal loaf was a fixture of the American cold table: cheap forequarter veal is lean and mild to the point of blandness, so recipes commonly added fat and savour from another meat, bound the whole with cracker crumbs and egg, and served it sliced cold for picnics, suppers and sandwiches. The essay tacked on after the recipe, on developing flavour in cheaper cuts by browning and by sauces, explains the logic exactly: this is a book concerned with making the less prized parts of the carcass palatable, and veal loaf is that argument put on a plate.