Home › Entrees › Ham and Veal Pates
Ham and Veal Pates
1 teaspoon salt. 1 lb. cold veal. 2 slices cold boiled ham. 2 tablespoons butter. 2 cups rich milk. 1 tablespoon browned flour. 2 hard-boiled eggs. 1/2 teaspoon minced onion. Dash cayenne. 1 tablespoon catsup. Make sauce with butter, flour and milk. Add pepper, salt and onion. Chop meat and eggs very fine. Add catsup and stir in sauce. Fill pate shells. This can be made into croquettes.
A cooked-meat entrée of the kind that turned Sunday's roast into Monday's dinner. Two details need translating before you start: the shells are not a baked pâté, and the flour is toasted first.
- "Pate shells" means patty shellsIn Wilson's usage a pâté is a puff-paste case — what a modern baker calls a patty shell or vol-au-vent. Frozen puff pastry shells, baked and hollowed, do the job; allow six to eight.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a skillet or a slow oven until it is the colour of a hazelnut. It gives the sauce colour and a nutty flavour, but browning destroys much of its thickening power. Expect a thin sauce from a single tablespoon against two cups of milk; 3 to 4 tablespoons gets you a filling that will sit in a shell.
- Rich milkMilk with cream added, or what would now be sold as half-and-half. Whole milk works; the filling will simply be leaner.
- CatsupAt this period the word could still mean tomato, mushroom or walnut catsup. Tomato is the likely reading here, giving a sharp, slightly sweet note against the ham.
- SaltThe teaspoon heads the ingredient list, but boiled ham and cold veal are both already salted -- season at the end, after tasting.
- Getting the texture rightChop the meat and eggs by hand rather than pulsing them in a processor, which turns veal to paste. The filling should hold a spoon shape, not pour.
- The croquette variationFor croquettes the mixture must be much stiffer: use the full flour, chill the mixture thoroughly until firm, then shape, crumb and fry. A soft mixture will burst in the fat.
- YieldEnough filling for roughly six to eight shells as a first course or a light supper dish.
Mrs. Wilson wrote as a wartime and postwar food economist, and this is a leftovers recipe wearing a French name — a pound of cold veal and two slices of cold ham, extended with a cream sauce and eggs to fill pastry cases. The pâté or patty shell was a fixture of American entrée cookery from the late nineteenth century onward: a puff-paste cup that made a small quantity of chopped meat look like a course. Browned flour, once a standard pantry preparation kept in a jar and used for gravies and brown sauces, has largely dropped out of home use since commercial gravy bases arrived, though the technique survives in the roux of Louisiana cooking. The recipe closes with a line offering a second use for the same mixture: "This can be made into croquettes."