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Blanquette of Veal
Take your veal, which need not be from the fillet or the best cuts. Cut it into pieces about an inch long and add a little water when putting it into the pan; salt, pepper and a little nutmeg, and let it simmer for two hours. When tender, stir in the juice of half a lemon, and then bind the sauce with the yolk of an egg, or, in default of that, with a little flour. Serve immediately. You will find that when you wish to bind a sauce at the last minute, egg powder will serve very well.
Veal Cake, excellent for Supper Take some chopped veal and with it an equal quantity of chopped beef, and one-quarter the quantity of breadcrumbs from a fresh loaf. Bind all with a raw egg, adding salt and pepper, and, if wished, some blanched and chopped almonds. (Put a large piece of butter both above and below.) Shape the meat into the form of a loaf and put it in a dish, with a large slice of butter above and below it. Cook it for about half-an-hour.
Breast of Veal (A good and inexpensive dish) Cook the breast of veal in stock or in a little meat extract and water, with sliced carrots and onions, thyme, pepper, salt, three bay-leaves and three cloves. Let it stew for one hour in this, and then take it out. Take out also the vegetables, and strain the liquor. Make a bechamel sauce and add it to the liquor, giving it all a sharp taste with the juice of half a lemon. Put back the breast of veal in this sauce and when hot again serve them together.
Three veal dishes run together with almost no quantities, in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew the shape of the dish. The proportions are yours to set; the technique is what these instructions actually carry.
- The hinge: never boil after the eggOnce the yolk goes in, the sauce must not return to a boil or it will curdle into threads. Take the pan off the heat, slacken the yolk with a ladle of the hot cooking liquor first, then stir it back in and warm through gently. This is why the recipe says serve immediately.
- Keep it whiteA blanquette is defined by the absence of browning. The meat goes into the pan with water rather than fat, and nothing is coloured at any stage. Sear the veal first and you no longer have a blanquette.
- Cut and quantityThe recipe says only that the cut need not be the best; shoulder or breast suits well, and the collagen is the point. Figure roughly 2 lb of veal with about 1 pint of water or light stock to serve four. Two hours at a bare simmer is not excessive for these cuts, though rather less may suffice with modern milk-fed veal.
- "A little water"Enough to barely cover, no more. The recipe gives no separate stock stage, so the cooking liquid becomes the sauce and wants to stay concentrated.
- Egg powder"Egg powder" at this date could mean dried egg or one of the proprietary egg-substitute powders then sold; dried whole egg and dried yolk are still available. The flour alternative works better as a beurre manié — cold, equal butter and flour, whisked in in small lumps — than as dry flour stirred into hot liquid.
- Veal Cake temperature and timeThe recipe names no oven and gives no setting; if you bake it, a moderate oven (around 350F) is a modern reading rather than the book's instruction. Half an hour is short for a meat loaf of any size; take it to 160F on a thermometer at the centre, which for a loaf made from 1 lb veal, 1 lb beef and 4 oz breadcrumbs usually means closer to an hour.
- Meat extractThe Breast of Veal calls for meat extract and water, meaning Bovril, Liebig's or similar. A stock cube or a spoonful of commercial beef base does the same job; both are salty, so hold back on the added salt until the end.
- Béchamel into the cooking liquorMake a plain white sauce and thin it with the strained, degreased braising liquid until it coats a spoon. Lemon juice goes in off the heat at the finish, or the sauce may take on a grainy edge.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain during the First World War from recipes given by Belgian refugees, and its terseness is part of the record: these were dishes contributed by displaced households rather than transcribed from a formal kitchen manuscript. That fits the repeated emphasis on cheapness here — veal that "need not be from the fillet", a breast described as "good and inexpensive", a supper loaf that stretches meat with breadcrumbs — as well as the aside about egg powder standing in for a fresh yolk. Blanquette takes its name from the French blanc, white, and the whole method is organised around keeping it so: no browning, no dark stock, and a liaison of egg yolk that thickens without colouring. The dish is generally treated as a classic of French bourgeois cooking, and its presence in a Belgian collection is unremarkable given how thoroughly Walloon and Brussels cooking shared that repertoire.