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Veal with Asparagus Tips
2 cups cooked veal 1 cup cooked asparagus tips 1 tablespoon butter Yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs 1 cup milk Salt and pepper Rub the yolks and butter to a paste; heat with the milk in the chafing dish, stirring until thoroughly mixed. Put in the veal and asparagus; season; cook five minutes and serve. rianned for a
A chafing-dish supper dish built on leftovers, thickened with hard-boiled egg yolk rather than flour. It comes together in under ten minutes once the components are cooked.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerSieved hard-boiled yolk and butter are the only thickening, and a boiling milk will scald and the sauce separate rather than coat. Hold the pan at a bare steam and stir steadily; the sauce should just coat the spoon.
- Rubbing the pastePress the cooked yolks through a sieve, then mash them into the soft butter until no lumps remain. Lumps left at this stage never disperse in the milk and show up as yellow specks in the finished sauce.
- Chafing dish equivalentsA chafing dish is a shallow pan over a spirit lamp, often supplied with a hot-water pan beneath. A heavy skillet or saucepan over the lowest burner setting does the same job; if your stove runs hot, set the pan in a wide skillet of simmering water.
- The vealThis assumes leftover roast or boiled veal, cut in neat dice or short strips about half an inch. Veal is lean and already cooked, so five minutes is to heat it through, not to tenderise it. Cooked chicken or turkey substitutes directly.
- Asparagus tipsCanned tips were widely available and would have served here; they are very soft. Fresh tips blanched two to three minutes hold their shape better. Add them at the very end and fold rather than stir, or they break up.
- SeasoningThe sauce is bland by design. It wants a firm hand with salt and white pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg or a spoonful of lemon juice at the end is period-appropriate and lifts it considerably.
- YieldAbout four servings as a light supper or luncheon dish. Serve on toast points, in pastry shells, or over rice; the sauce is thin enough that it needs something beneath it.
- The stray words"rianned for a" at the end is a stray text artifact, not part of the method.
Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in American households between roughly the 1890s and the First World War, and cookbooks of the period routinely gave it its own chapter. The appeal was partly social — the dish was made at the table, in front of guests, at a late supper or after the theatre — and partly practical, since a spirit lamp let people cook in a bedsit, a club room, or a dining room without going near the kitchen range. The recipes reflect that: nearly everything begins with an ingredient already cooked, and the work at table is limited to a sauce and a few minutes of heating. Thickening with sieved hard-boiled yolk instead of a roux suits the same conditions, avoiding the several minutes of stirring flour and butter that a chafing dish over an alcohol flame does poorly.