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Veal Cakes
1 pound cold chopped veal 1/2 pound soaked bread crumbs Dash of pepper 1 teaspoon chopped onion 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons fat or butter Mix all the ingredients except the fat; mold into small cakes. Melt the fat in a frying pan and brown the cakes in it, first on one side, then on the other.
A leftovers dish from the era of food conservation: cooked veal stretched with soaked bread. It works, but the original assumes a few things a modern cook should know before starting.
- Soaked bread crumbsThis means stale bread — not dry packaged crumbs — covered in water or milk until soft, then squeezed nearly dry. Half a pound of bread is roughly six thick slices; dry crumbs will drink the moisture out of the meat and give you a sandy cake.
- The binder problemThere is no egg here, which leaves the cakes fragile. Squeeze the bread until it just holds together, pack the cakes firmly, and chill them 20 minutes before frying so they hold their shape in the pan.
- Cold chopped vealThe recipe presumes leftover roast or boiled veal, hand-chopped rather than ground to paste. Chop to a coarse mince — a food processor pulsed a few times, no further — or the cakes turn pasty.
- The onion is rawA teaspoon of raw chopped onion will stay crunchy and sharp in a cake browned for a few minutes a side. Soften it in a little of the fat first if you want it to disappear into the mixture.
- SaltA full teaspoon seasons the whole mixture, and leftover roast veal may already carry seasoning of its own. Taste a pinch of the mixture, or fry a test spoonful, before committing.
- Fat and heatTwo tablespoons is enough for shallow frying in a heavy pan over medium heat. The meat is already cooked, so you are only browning and heating through — three to four minutes a side. Longer dries them out.
- YieldAbout eight cakes roughly two and a half inches across; four servings with a sauce or gravy, which the recipe assumes you will supply yourself.
Jane Eayre Fryer's loose-leaf book belongs to the American home-economics tradition, in which cookbooks were reorganised around nutrition, thrift and standardised measurement. Meat stretched with soaked bread was a familiar economy of the wartime and post-war food conservation campaigns, which urged households to extend meat rather than abandon it. Cakes, croquettes and rissoles of chopped cooked meat run through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery as an answer to the Monday remains of a Sunday joint -- the loose-leaf binding of Fryer's book, which let a cook add and rearrange pages, suited that sort of everyday improvisation.