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Soufflé of Veal
1 pint (2 cups) cold cooked 1 pint (2 cups) milk chopped veal 2 ozs. (2 heaping tablespoonfuls) butter 2 ozs. (2 heaping tablespoonfuls) flour 1 pint (2 cups) milk 4 eggs 2 tablespoonfuls chopped parsley Salt and pepper to taste Blend the butter and the flour in an earthenware dish over the fire, add gradually the milk, stir till it thickens, and cook for five minutes. Then add the veal, parsley, and the seasonings.
Remove from the fire and add the eggs well beaten.
Pour into a well-buttered casserole and bake in the oven until nicely browned, it will take twenty or twenty-five minutes.
Serve hot.
A béchamel bound with eggs and stretched with yesterday's roast — a workhorse of the cold-meat chapter rather than a true risen soufflé. The one thing that decides the result is the egg: beat the eggs thoroughly and add them only after the sauce is off the heat, or they will scramble in streaks and the mixture will weep in the oven.
- The duplicated milk is a typesetting errorThe ingredient list shows milk twice, apparently a duplication in the two-column list as transcribed; the method uses it once. Use 2 cups total. Two pints of milk to 2 oz flour would give a sauce far too thin to carry the meat.
- Weights to spoons2 oz butter is about 4 level tablespoons; 2 oz flour is nearer 7 or 8 level tablespoons by modern measure, so the book's "2 heaping tablespoonfuls" of each should be treated as an approximation rather than an exact equivalent. Either way the sauce is a stiff one, which is what carries the meat.
- "Bake until nicely browned"The recipe gives no oven heat at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits the stated 20 to 25 minutes in a shallow dish; a deep casserole will want longer. Test that the centre is set rather than trusting the colour on top.
- Earthenware over direct heatThe instruction to blend butter and flour "in an earthenware dish over the fire" assumes flameproof pottery set over a range fire. Ordinary stoneware and modern ceramic bakeware will crack on a gas or electric burner. Make the sauce in a saucepan and transfer it.
- "Casserole" hereHere the word means the vessel, not a genre of dish. Any buttered 1.5-quart baking dish serves.
- Whole eggs, not separatedFour whole eggs beaten together give a set, custardy loaf that puffs a little and settles. If you want it to rise properly, fold in the whites beaten stiff at the end — but that is a departure from what is written.
- Temper before combiningPour a ladle of the hot sauce into the beaten eggs first, then return the lot to the pan. Adding cold eggs straight into a pint of hot béchamel is an easy way to get streaks of scrambled egg.
- SeasoningCold cooked veal is bland and the sauce is blander. Season the béchamel assertively — salt, white pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg or a little lemon zest are all in period and all welcome.
- YieldServes four as a light main course, six as a first course or supper dish. It is best straight from the oven; reheated it turns dense.
Cold-meat cookery had a whole literature of its own in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a large joint was roasted on Sunday and had to reappear, disguised, through the week. Veal was the natural candidate: mild, pale, and dry enough that a rich sauce improved it. The word souffl hen then than now \and baked in a dish, not only the classic separated-white construction associated with restaurant kitchens. Casserole cookery was promoted as economical and as a way of cooking and serving in one vessel, which saved both fuel and washing-up; the fashion is generally traced to the growing English and American interest in French provincial en casserole cooking around the turn of the century.