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Scraps of Meat
Your scraps of meat must be cut small or roughly minced; add to them a little sausage-meat, about a quarter as much, and a slice of white crumb bread that you have dipped in water or milk, and well drained. If eggs are not too dear, add two eggs, mixing them with the meat. Place the dish in the oven for half-an-hour--but it must be a slow oven--and take care that the meat does not become dry.
This is a leftovers loaf rather than a formal dish: a Belgian household's way of turning yesterday's roast into something worth serving. The original assumes you know what a moist, slow-baked forcemeat should look like, so a few blanks need filling.
- What the scraps areMost likely trimmings from meat already cooked -- roast beef, veal, pork, boiled ham -- though the recipe does not say so. On that reading the sausage-meat is the only raw component, and it supplies the fat and binding that cooked scraps have lost.
- A slow oven300F to 325F. Anything hotter drives moisture out of cooked meat and gives you a dry, crumbly brick, which is precisely the fault the recipe warns against.
- Half an hour is the minimum, not the targetBecause raw sausage-meat is mixed through, take the loaf to 160F on a thermometer at the centre. In a shallow dish half an hour at 300F will usually do it; in a deep one it will not.
- The soaked breadThis is a panade. Crustless white bread soaked in milk and squeezed out holds water in the mixture as it bakes. One thick slice per pound of meat is about right; more turns the loaf pasty.
- ProportionsRead it as four parts cooked meat to one part sausage-meat by weight. Two eggs suit roughly a pound and a half of mixture -- one egg is enough for a smaller quantity, and too much egg makes the texture rubbery.
- Keeping it from dryingPack the mixture into a buttered dish, cover with a lid or foil for most of the baking, and add a few spoonfuls of stock or gravy if the meat was lean. Uncover at the end if you want a browned top.
- SeasoningNone is specified. Salt, pepper, grated nutmeg, chopped parsley and a little onion softened in butter would all suit the mixture.
- Yield and servingAbout a pound and a half of mixture serves three or four. It is good hot with potatoes, and equally good cold and sliced the next day.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in Britain during the First World War from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees, and few pages show their circumstances as plainly as this one. The instruction is not a recipe so much as a method for making the ends of a joint stretch to another meal, and the aside "if eggs are not too dear" fixes it firmly in a period of rising food prices and unreliable supply on both sides of the Channel. The technique itself is much older and quite general: bread soaked in milk, a little fatty raw pork, and egg to bind are the standard tools of European forcemeat cookery, used the same way in a boulette, a pain de viande or an English rissole. Sausage-meat supplies the richness here in place of suet, though that hardly distinguishes the dish from its British counterparts, which were made much the same way; the one firm instruction is the slow oven.