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Mince with Bread Crumbs
Chop up any kind of cold meat very fine, place in a baking dish a layer of bread crumbs, seasoned with lump of butter, black pepper, and salt. Then a layer of minced meat, and so on with alternate layers, till the dish is filled. Pour over all a cup of rich cream, and be sure to have enough lumps of butter to make it rich. Bake until it is a good brown on top.-Mrs. C. M. A.
A leftover-meat gratin with no quantities, no oven temperature and no timing — the sort of recipe written for a cook who already knew what the dish should look like. A few decisions have to be made for it.
- The hinge: the meat is already cookedNothing here is being cooked through; the bake exists only to heat the layers and brown the top. Overbaking dries cold roast beef or lamb into grit, so pull it as soon as the surface has colour and the cream is bubbling at the edges.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate-to-hot oven, around 375-400°F, should brown the top in 25-30 minutes without stewing the interior; a slower oven will take longer to colour the crumbs.
- ProportionsFor a 1½-quart dish, roughly 3 cups of finely chopped cooked meat to 2 cups of coarse bread crumbs, in three alternating layers, ending with crumbs. That serves four to six.
- "Bread crumbs" in 1879Period recipes used the term for both grated dry bread and soft fresh crumb. Fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf are the safer reading here: they take up the cream and stay tender, where very dry crumbs can set hard.
- A cup of rich creamNineteenth-century "rich cream" was probably closer to modern heavy cream than to today's light cream. A full cup over a small dish is generous -- enough that the crumb layers are moistened throughout, not merely damp on top. Half-and-half can be substituted, though lower-fat dairy is more likely to separate in a hot oven.
- "Enough lumps of butter"Read this as roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons total, dotted over each crumb layer rather than heaped on one. Cold cooked meat renders little fat in so short a bake, which may be why the instruction is repeated.
- SeasoningCold leftover roast tends to taste under-seasoned. Season the crumb layers assertively; a little of the original gravy or a spoonful of stock stirred through the meat is another option rather than more cream.
- Which meats workBeef, lamb, veal, ham and roast poultry all suit this. Avoid mixing cured and fresh meats in quantity — the salt in ham will overwhelm the cream.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some two hundred and fifty ladies of Virginia and her sister states, is full of these initialled second-day dishes, and they say a good deal about how a household with a large Sunday roast actually ate through the week. Layering minced cold meat with buttered crumbs and cream is the plain domestic cousin of the French gratin, and the same idea travels under many names — scallop, mince, hash — depending on the region and the binder. This particular contributor specifies almost nothing: no weights, no oven, no time, just the two instructions a mistress would actually need to give a cook who had made the dish a hundred times, which are to season the crumbs and not to stint on the butter.