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Chopped Veal
1 lb. chopped veal I heaping tablespoonful (I 3/4 pint (1½ cups) gravy or stock oz.) butter I heaping tablespoonful (I Seasoning salt, pepper, lemon juice, and mace oz.) flour Toast points and cut lemon Put the butter into a fireproof dish, and when quite hot add the flour and brown it, then add the stock; boil for five minutes, then add the veal and seasonings. Heat through but do not boil. Serve garnished with toast points and cut lemon.
The gravy or stock may be made by stewing the veal bones with a carrot, turnip, onion, sprig of parsley, and a strip of lemon rind for one hour.
A Victorian way of using up the remains of a roast or boiled joint: chopped cooked veal warmed through in a brown sauce, not a dish made from raw meat. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once the stock is to hand.
- The meat is already cookedThe method assumes leftover roast or boiled veal, chopped small: raw veal would never cook through in the brief warming the recipe allows. Note that the recipe itself says only 'chopped veal'.
- Do not let it boilThe instruction to heat through without boiling is the hinge. Already-cooked veal held at a simmer squeezes out its moisture and turns stringy within a few minutes; keep the pan just below a shiver.
- Quantities1 lb chopped cooked veal, 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour, and 3/4 pint stock, which is about 1 1/2 US cups. A heaping tablespoon of flour weighing an ounce is roughly 1/4 cup by modern measure.
- Fireproof dishHere it means a vessel that can go directly on the burner, since the butter is heated and the sauce boiled in it. Any heavy saucepan will do.
- Browning the flourCook the butter and flour together over moderate heat until it smells nutty and turns the colour of weak coffee, then add the stock off the heat and whisk. Five minutes of boiling cooks out the raw flour taste and sets the thickness.
- MaceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, milder and more floral than nutmeg itself. Ground mace is still sold; a small pinch is enough for this quantity of sauce, and grated nutmeg substitutes acceptably.
- The bone stockAn hour of stewing the veal bones with carrot, turnip, onion, parsley and lemon peel gives a light stock. A good unsalted chicken stock is the nearest shop-bought equivalent; season at the end, since the reduction concentrates the salt.
- YieldA pound of meat in this much sauce serves three or four on toast. Cut the toast into triangles and stand them round the edge, with lemon wedges to sharpen the richness.
Chopped or minced veal in a brown lemon-scented sauce was a fixture of English cold-meat cookery, where the second appearance of a joint mattered as much as the first. Books of this kind returned to it often because a large roast was economical only if the remains were made presentable, and reheating leftovers in a made sauce with toast points was the standard way of doing that. Veal held a particular place in that scheme: mild, pale and inclined to dryness, it was thought to want assertive seasoning, and the combination of lemon juice, lemon rind and mace recurs across nineteenth-century veal recipes almost as a signature. The casserole books of the early twentieth century, promoting single flameproof vessels for both cooking and serving, absorbed these older dishes wholesale.