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Veal Ramequins
1 lb. diced cooked veal ¼ lb. cooked ham or tongue 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley 6 cooked button mushrooms 4 tablespoonfuls white sauce 2 eggs Salt and pepper to taste 1 cupful rice Some stock Tomato sauce Cook the rice in some boiling stock till tender, then drain it. Line some small buttered ramequins with it.
Mix together the veal, ham, or tongue cut into strips, the parsley, sauce, seasonings, the mushrooms chopped, yolks of eggs, and whites of eggs well beaten; divide this mixture into the prepared dishes.
Cover and steam for twenty minutes. Serve hot with tomato sauce.
A tidy way to use up Sunday's roast: a rice-lined mould filled with a bound meat mixture and steamed rather than baked. Nothing here is difficult, but the ingredient list has been mangled by the scanner and needs reading carefully.
- Read the numerals as fractions"14 lb. cooked ham or tongue" is a broken ¼ lb., and the capital I's are 1: 1 lb veal, 1 cupful rice. A quarter pound of ham against a pound of veal is the right proportion — the cured meat is seasoning, not bulk.
- The hinge: whites beaten separatelyThe yolks go in with the meat and the whites are whipped and folded in last. That is what keeps the filling light instead of dense and sliceable. Fold gently and fill the moulds at once.
- RamequinsStandard 4-6 oz ovenproof ramekins. Butter them well and press the drained rice up the sides in a layer about ¼ inch thick; it will set as it steams and turn out as a neat case.
- Cooking the rice in stockUse a long or medium grain and cook it slightly past al dente so it packs and clings. Boiling it loose in plenty of stock and draining, as written, gives a firmer grain than an absorption method — which is what you want for lining.
- "Cover and steam"Cover each ramekin with buttered foil or a round of baking paper and set them in a covered steamer, as the recipe directs; a covered tin of hot water in the oven is a modern substitute, but the book gives no oven heat. Twenty minutes suits small moulds; the filling should be just set and no longer wobbly at the centre.
- Button mushrooms, already cookedThe recipe assumes mushrooms cooked beforehand, which matters — raw mushrooms would shed water into the egg mixture. Sauté six small ones in butter until they stop weeping, then chop.
- White sauceOnly four tablespoonfuls, which suggests a fairly thick sauce acting as a binder rather than a pouring sauce, though the recipe does not specify. Make it with a scant tablespoon each of butter and flour to about ½ cup of milk and let it cool before mixing in the eggs.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many moulds it fills; a pound of veal with the ham, mushrooms and sauce will fill roughly six small ramekins, serving six as a first course or three or four as a light main with the tomato sauce and a green vegetable.
Ramequin, now more often spelled ramekin, came into English from French around the turn of the eighteenth century as the name of a small cheese-and-bread preparation; later the word migrated from the dish to the vessel it was baked in. By the early twentieth century the ramequin was commonly a piece of equipment, and recipes like this one belong to the genre of respectable leftovers -- the "cold meat cookery" chapter that many household manuals of the period carried. Cooked veal, a little ham or tongue for savour, mushrooms and a spoonful of sauce were bound with egg and dressed up in a rice case so that Monday's table did not look like Sunday's. Steaming rather than roasting kept the veal, a lean meat that dries easily, tender, and the tomato sauce supplied the acidity the mixture otherwise lacks.