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To Use Up Cold Meat
Take a fresh celery, wash it well, and remove the green leaves. Let it boil till half-cooked in salted water. Drain it on a sieve, and then cut it lengthways, and place minced meat of any kind, well seasoned, between the two pieces. Tie them together with a thread and let them cook again for a quarter of an hour, this time either in the same water and gently simmered, or in the oven in a well-buttered dish. Other people, to avoid the trouble of tying the two halves, spread the mince on each half and cook it in the oven, laid flat in a fireproof dish. In this case put a good lump of butter on each portion of mince.
A stuffed-celery supper built around yesterday's roast. The whole point is that the meat is already cooked, so the second cooking is about heating through and marrying flavours, not about cooking mince from raw.
- "A fresh celery" means a whole headNot a single rib. Trim the root, cut off the leafy tops, and split the head lengthways so you have two halves that still hold together at the base. Heads of the period were probably smaller than a modern supermarket one; if yours is large, use the inner two-thirds and save the outer ribs for stock.
- Half-cookedEight to ten minutes at a gentle boil in well-salted water. The ribs should bend without snapping but still have resistance — fully soft celery collapses as soon as you tie it.
- The meat is already cookedThis is a leftovers dish: cold roast beef, lamb, veal or chicken, minced or chopped fine and seasoned hard. Because the filling is pre-cooked, it must be reheated all the way through — bring the centre to 165F/74C, which the quarter hour will comfortably do in a hot dish.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, 350–375F/180–190C, for the same quarter hour, uncovered so the butter browns the top.
- TyingCotton kitchen twine, two or three loops along the length. Do not use synthetic thread. Remove the twine before serving; the recipe offers the flat, open-faced alternative simply to avoid the trouble of tying the halves together.
- Seasoning is the hingeCold cooked meat is bland and dry. Season the mince well beyond what feels right — salt, pepper, plenty of grated nutmeg or a little mustard, chopped parsley and onion softened in butter — and bind it with a spoonful of gravy or thick béchamel so it does not turn to sand in the oven.
- ButterThe recipe calls for a good lump of butter on each open portion. Cold cooked meat, especially if lean and unbound, dries out quickly in the oven, and the butter is what keeps it moist.
- YieldOne head of celery, split, feeds two as a light main course with bread and potatoes, or four as a first course.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain in 1915 from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees, who had arrived in large numbers after the German invasion of 1914, and it is generally said to have been published in aid of relief funds — which would explain why a book of national cookery devotes so much space to thrift. Recipes for using up cold meat, with no measurements and no named quantity of anything, belong to a household economy in which the Sunday joint was expected to reappear on Monday and Tuesday in some other form. Celery served hot as a vegetable, braised or stuffed rather than eaten raw from a glass, was familiar in northern France and Belgium; the technique here — split, blanch, fill, bind, finish in the oven — resembles the treatment given to other vegetables such as cabbage, endive and leeks. Culinary celery is generally thought to have been bred away from its bitter wild ancestor by Italian and French gardeners over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and by 1915 blanched winter celery was a familiar market vegetable.