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Ways of Warming Over Veal
Minced Veal on Toast Prepare as Minced Lamb on Toast, using veal in place of lamb.
A one-line cross-reference from the chapter on using up cooked veal. Minced Lamb on Toast, the parent recipe, is cold cooked meat chopped fine, bound in a thin white sauce, seasoned, heated through and spooned over buttered toast — so everything worth saying here is about the meat and the sauce.
- What the parent recipe isMinced Lamb on Toast in this book is finely chopped cold cooked meat folded into a white sauce, seasoned with salt and pepper and served on toast. "Minced" means knife-chopped fine, not ground to a paste.
- Reheat, do not cookThe veal is already cooked. It goes into hot sauce only long enough to heat through — two or three minutes. Simmering chopped veal in white sauce dries and toughens it, and veal has less fat than lamb to protect it.
- Leftovers handlingCold roast veal should have been refrigerated promptly and used within three or four days, and the finished dish brought to a full steaming heat throughout. The icebox of the period did the same job less reliably, which is partly why these warmed-over chapters exist.
- Veal todayRoast veal is no longer a common household leftover. The dish works with any mild cooked meat — chicken, turkey, pork loin — and the seasoning notes below apply equally.
- Season harder than the original suggestsVeal is blander than lamb, so a white sauce made only with salt and pepper will taste flat. A grating of nutmeg, a little lemon juice or a spoonful of sherry are period-appropriate corrections.
- The toastCut it thick and butter it while hot, so the sauce is slower to soak through. Trimmed and halved diagonally into points is a common way of serving it.
- YieldEqual quantities of meat and sauce will serve two generously, or four as a light supper or luncheon dish; the recipe itself states no yield.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks devote whole chapters to "warmed-over" or "rechauffe" dishes, and the reason is economic rather than culinary: a joint of meat was bought and roasted whole, and what came off it cold on Monday still had to feed the household. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book organises these by meat, which is why veal gets its own short list and why several entries are nothing more than a pointer to the lamb version — the technique is identical, only the animal changes. Veal was cheaper and more widely eaten in the United States then than now, and its mildness made it a natural partner for the white sauce that underpins so much of this book. The formula of chopped meat plus bechamel plus toast is the same one that produces creamed chicken, chipped beef and countless chafing-dish suppers of the period; toast served as the plate and the reason the dish counted as a meal.