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Cold Veal Dressed with White Sauce
Boil one pint milk and thicken it a little with one teaspoon ful flour, wet with cold water. When well boiled, put it very thin slices of veal, and simmer slowly for fifteen minutes.
Have the yolk of an egg well beaten up, and add to the meat, also a piece of butter.
Let it boil up once, stirring all the time, and serve it on toasted slices of bread. A few slices of bacon, cut thin and fried to a crisp, make a good relish with this dish.--Mrs. G. P.
A leftovers dish: cold roasted or boiled veal reheated in a thin milk sauce, enriched with egg yolk at the last moment. The whole thing depends on not letting the sauce boil hard after the yolk goes in.
- The hinge: the egg yolk"Let it boil up once" means bring it barely to the point of bubbling and pull it off, stirring constantly. A yolk in one pint of thin milk sauce will curdle into grains if held at a real boil. Temper the beaten yolk with a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce before it goes into the pan.
- The veal is already cookedThis is a cold-meat recipe. Slice roast or poached veal as thinly as you can manage, cold, and use the fifteen minutes only to heat it through and let it flavour the milk.
- One teaspoon of flour is very littleA teaspoon of flour to a pint of milk gives a sauce barely thicker than cream, consistent with the recipe's own "thicken it a little." If you want it to coat the toast rather than soak it, use a tablespoon, still slaked with cold water and added to the simmering milk in a thin stream.
- "A piece of butter"Unspecified, as usual in this book. One to two tablespoons is right for a pint; add it off the heat with the yolk so it emulsifies rather than melts to a slick.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. Salt, white pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg or mace would not be out of place in a white sauce of this date, and the dish is flat without at least salt.
- The toastToast the bread dry and firm and lay it in a warm dish; soft toast disintegrates immediately under a thin sauce.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of veal. A pint of sauce with roughly a pound of sliced veal will serve four as a lunch or supper dish, with the crisp bacon crumbled over.
Cold-meat cookery had a chapter of its own in nineteenth-century American household books, and Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, is thick with it — the initialled attribution "Mrs. G. P." is how that book credits its many contributors. Before mechanical refrigeration a large roast had to be eaten down over several days, and the second and third appearances of a joint were more often than not disguised rather than simply reheated: hence hashes, croquettes, mince on toast, and dressings in white sauce like this one. Veal in particular suited the treatment, being mild and pale enough that a milk sauce did not look muddy. The finishing liaison of egg yolk and butter is a French technique that had long since naturalised in Anglo-American kitchens, and the fried bacon on the side supplies the salt and crunch that the veal itself cannot.