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Ragout of Veal
Reheat two cups cold roast veal, cut in cubes, in one and one-half cups brown sauce seasoned with one teaspoon Worchestershire sauce, few drops of onion juice, and a few grains of cayenne. To extract juice from onion, cut a slice from root end, draw back the skin, and press onion on a coarse grater, working with a rotary motion. Gyda Finstad.
A leftovers dish built on the assumption that a brown sauce is already in the refrigerator. Everything hinges on gentle reheating: the veal is fully cooked, and any hard boiling will squeeze it dry and stringy.
- Brown sauceNot the bottled British condiment. In a book of this vintage it means a basic espagnole or plain brown gravy — roux cooked to a nut color, moistened with brown stock, simmered and strained. A cup and a half is enough to coat the meat, not to swim it.
- Cold roast vealTwo cups of cubes is roughly 10-12 oz of cooked meat. Trim gristle and any dry outer crust before cubing; the reheat will not tenderize it.
- Heat, not simmerBring the sauce to a bare shiver, add the veal, and hold it 5-8 minutes until hot through. Boiling already-roasted veal is what turns this dish gray and rubbery.
- Onion juiceThe grater method works, though a microplane over a bowl is less punishing on the knuckles. "A few drops" is just that — a handful of drops, well under 1/4 teaspoon; substituting minced onion changes the texture and needs to be softened in fat first.
- "A few grains" of cayenneRead it as a scant pinch — under 1/8 teaspoon. In books of this kind cayenne generally seems to have served as background warmth rather than identifiable heat.
- Seasoning at the endSeasoning -- Worcestershire and cayenne sharpen as a sauce reduces, so taste before adding more. The recipe puts both into the brown sauce before the veal goes in; salt last, since the brown stock already carries salt.
- Yield and serviceEnough for three or four at luncheon. The recipe specifies no accompaniment; toast points, a rice border, puff-paste shells or buttered noodles all suit it.
A ragout is simply French ragoût, from ragoûter, to revive the appetite — and in American church and club cookbooks the word often did honest duty as a respectable name for reheated meat. Cold roast veal was a common enough basis for second-day dishes, and books compiled from members' contributions and signed with each contributor's name tend to be full of them: the proportions and the seasoning are given, the brown sauce assumed. The aside on extracting onion juice is a good marker of the era's habits, when a coarse grater stood in for the small kitchen tools now taken for granted.