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Fricadelle
For one pound of minced pork take one and one-half pounds of minced veal; cut three slices of white bread the thickness of nearly an inch, and crumble them up; two raw eggs, pepper and salt. Mix it all well, and place it in the oven for half-an-hour. If you eat this hot, serve it with a gravy sauce. If you wish for a supper-dish, put salad round the meat.
Chicory and Ham with Cheese Sauce Cook the chicories gently in butter till they are done. Then take each one, and roll it in a slice of ham, and put them in a fireproof dish. Then make a very good white sauce of flour and butter and milk, adding cheese to flavor it strongly, and the yolk of an egg. Pour this sauce over the chicory, and place the dish in the oven. Let it turn brownish, and then serve it directly.
Two dishes run together on one page: a baked pork-and-veal loaf, and braised endive rolled in ham under cheese sauce. Both assume a cook who knows what a loaf and a gratin look like when they are done, so the numbers need filling in.
- The timing is the problemHalf an hour will not cook two and a half pounds of raw ground meat through. A loaf that size needs roughly an hour to an hour and a quarter at 350F, and ground pork and veal should reach 160F on an instant-read thermometer at the centre.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was usual in domestic recipe writing of this kind in 1915. A moderate oven, 350F, suits the fricadelle. The chicory gratin wants hotter, 400F or a few minutes under the broiler, since everything in it is already cooked and only needs colouring.
- The breadThree inch-thick slices of white bread is a lot of filler by modern standards, and dry crumbs will pull moisture out of the loaf. Soaking the crumbled bread in a little milk before mixing gives a panade and keeps the meat tender.
- VealGround veal is no longer a supermarket staple in most places and costs considerably more than pork. A pound and a half of ground beef chuck in its place gives a coarser but perfectly good loaf; the pork carries the fat either way.
- "A gravy sauce"Meaning pan juices let down with stock and thickened, not a separate preparation. Deglaze the roasting dish with stock or a splash of Belgian brown ale and whisk in a little beurre manié.
- Chicory means Belgian endiveThe tight pale spears sold as witloof, endive or chicon, not the frizzy salad green also called chicory in English. Braise them whole in butter with a squeeze of lemon and a pinch of sugar, lid on, 25 to 30 minutes, until a knife slides through the base.
- Drain them hardEndive holds a great deal of water and will thin the cheese sauce into a puddle. Press each cooked spear gently in a cloth before rolling it in ham.
- The egg yolkBeat it into the sauce off the heat, after the cheese has melted. Returned to a boil it will scramble and the sauce will break under the grill.
- YieldThe fricadelle serves eight hot with sauce, or six as the cold supper dish with salad round it. Two endive rolls per person is a first course; three with bread and butter is supper.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in 1915 by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion and were being housed in Britain, which is why the dishes read like household notes rather than professional formulas: they were dictated from memory by cooks who had left their kitchens behind. Fricadelle belongs to a wide northern European family of chopped-meat preparations, related to the Dutch frikandel; in Belgium the word covered both a pan-fried patty and, as here, a baked loaf of mixed pork and veal. The second recipe is the more distinctly Belgian of the two. Witloof chicory is generally traced to the Brussels area in the 1830s, where forcing chicory roots in the dark is said to have produced the blanched heads by accident, and chicons au gratin is one of the country's defining home dishes. That it appears in a wartime charity cookbook, written down for British readers who had probably never seen the vegetable, says something about how quickly it had come to stand for Belgian cooking itself.