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Scalloped Veal
Chop two cups of cold cooked veal; add one fourth teaspoon salt, one fourth teaspoon onion juice, and one teaspoon lemon juice. Mix one half cup finely chopped cooked ham, one fourth teaspoon mustard, few grains cayenne, two tablespoons cracker crumbs, and moisten with white stock. Sauté one fourth cup cracker crumbs in one fourth cup butter; add to chopped veal and moisten with white stock.
Line a mold with slices of hard-cooked eggs, fill with alternate layers of ham mixture and veal. Pack tightly, cover with buttered paper, and steam one hour. Cool and serve in thin slices.
The success of this dish depends on careful seasoning, and more may be needed than is given in the recipe.
This is a steamed, pressed meat loaf meant to be chilled and sliced thin — closer to a galantine or a potted terrine than to anything baked in a scalloped dish. The seasoning note at the end is the recipe's most honest line: cold meat swallows salt, and the mixture will taste flat unless you correct it before it goes into the mold.
- Season while warm, taste while coldMix and season the meat, then fry a teaspoon of it in a little butter and taste that, since the raw mixture reads saltier than the finished chilled loaf. Expect to double the quarter teaspoon of salt for two and a half cups of meat, and be generous with the mustard and cayenne.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock, mild and gelatinous from bones. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; use it sparingly — the mixtures should be barely moist and cohesive, not sloppy, or the loaf will not slice.
- Onion juiceGrate a piece of onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or grate directly and use the resulting slurry. A quarter teaspoon of juice is roughly what a teaspoon or so of very finely grated onion will give up, though this varies with the onion.
- Cracker crumbsSoda crackers or plain water biscuits crushed fine, not seasoned cracker meal and not the coarse dry breadcrumbs sold today. Panko is too airy here; saltines pounded in a bag are the closest match, and remember they carry salt of their own.
- The moldA one-quart loaf pan, charlotte mold or pudding basin, buttered, then lined with overlapping slices of hard-cooked egg before filling. Buttered paper means a round of parchment pressed on the surface; cover the whole thing with foil so condensation from the steamer does not run in.
- SteamingSet the covered mold on a rack in a deep pot with an inch or two of simmering water, lid on, and keep the water at a bare simmer for the full hour, topping up as needed. If you have no steamer tall enough, a low-oven water bath will serve, though the recipe specifies steaming only.
- Cool under weightThe recipe says cool but not how. Leave the paper on, set a small plate and a can on top, and refrigerate at least six hours or overnight. Weighting helps it hold together for thin slicing.
- Yield and servingAbout six servings as a first course or light lunch. Slice thin and cold with mustard, pickles or a sharp salad; it was intended for a cold buffet or supper table, not to be served hot.
- Cold cooked vealRoughly a pound of leftover roast or braised veal, hand-chopped rather than ground so the loaf keeps some texture. Cooked turkey thigh or pork shoulder substitutes without much loss.
Pressed loaves of chopped cold meat set with egg and stock were a fixture of American entrée later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the family joint was expected to reappear at a second and third meal in a more presentable form. Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and though it is remembered for its confectionery chapters it was compiled by Maria Willett Howard as a general household book in the Boston Cooking School manner — hens the exact fractional teaspoons, the reliance on white stock, and the assumption that a cook keeps cracker crumbs and onion juice to hand. The egg-lined mold is a domestic echo of the professional galantine.