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Marsden, or Veal Cake
550. Take a pie dish and butter it; cut hard-boiled eggs into slices, and lay them round the sides of the dish and at the bottom, then slices of cold veal, ham, and pickles; season it well, and pour over it all some good rich gravy; then place layer after layer as at the beginning, filling it up with good gravy; when quite full, bake twenty minutes. Turn out when cold.
Or, Take the best end of a neck of veal, bone it and cut it into small pieces; boil six eggs hard, divide the yolks, and cut the whites into pieces; take two anchovies, some parsley chopped fine, ham rather lean cut in thin slices, season these well with cayenne, black pepper, salt, and nutmeg; put a layer of veal, parsley, ham, &c., till the deep dish is full; pour a cup of water over it and the bones at the top; cover it close down, and bake it in a slow oven for four hours; take the bones off when it comes out, and turn it out when cold. Another. Take the thick part of a leg of real, free from skin and sinews, some good fresh suet or marrow, with a little bit of clear fat bacon. Beat it in a marble mortar till it comes to a paste. Season with white pepper, cayenne, salt, nutmeg, and mace, and, if it is liked, with a little lemon-peel. Make it up in cakes about the size of a biscuit; fry them in clear dripping till they become of a nice light brown. Serve them up with white sauce, which must not be put over them. This makes a pretty corner dish, or for first or second course for a small party.
Three distinct dishes share one heading here: two cold pressed veal loaves set in their own jelly, and a third that is really a fried veal forcemeat cake. Decide which you are making before you shop, because the first two are made from cooked meat and the third from raw.
- The hinge: the gravy must setVersions one and two are held together by gelatin, not by binding. The "good rich gravy" needs to be a genuine reduced veal or chicken stock that jellies firmly when chilled; a thin or defatted modern stock will leave you with a wet pile of meat when you invert the dish.
- Chill before turning out"Turn out when cold" means fully chilled, several hours at least and preferably overnight in the refrigerator. Dip the dish briefly in hot water and run a thin knife round the edge before inverting.
- Oven temperatures"Slow oven" for the four-hour version is usually taken as somewhere around 300F. The book gives no oven setting at all for the twenty-minute first version; it needs only enough heat to melt the gravy through layers of already-cooked meat, so a moderate oven will serve.
- Best end of neckThat is the rib end of the veal, sold today as veal rack or rib chops. Boned veal shoulder is a cheaper and more forgiving substitute, and the bones laid on top are there for gelatin, so keep them if you can get them.
- Only a cup of waterIn the second version the meat is meant to steam in its own juices under a tight cover. Use a lidded terrine or a dish sealed with foil, and check after two hours that it has not gone dry.
- Anchovies as seasoningTwo anchovies here are a savoury note rather than a fish flavour; period anchovies were whole salted fish, so allow roughly four oil-packed fillets, or a teaspoon or so of anchovy paste, and count it as part of the salt.
- Third version: dripping and mortarBeef dripping or lard for frying, at a moderate heat so the cakes cook through before browning. A food processor does in thirty seconds what the marble mortar did in twenty minutes, but pulse rather than run it, or the paste turns pasty and dense.
- Suet and marrowFresh beef suet is a butcher's order now; grated frozen suet or finely chopped fatty pork will keep the cakes moist. Without some fat the mixture fries dry.
- Yield and servingA pie dish of either pressed version will serve six to eight cold, cut in wedges with pickles or salad, though the recipe gives neither dish size nor quantities. The fried cakes, made biscuit-sized, might give a dozen depending on the size of the leg; the sauce is kept beside rather than over them, presumably to stop the crust going soft.
History: Cold pressed veal in jelly was a familiar dish of the Victorian cold table: cheap cooked meat, hard eggs and pickles layered into a mould, set with stock and turned out to be sliced at will, which suited households serving luncheon and supper from what stood in the larder. The name "Marsden" here is the sort of family or place attribution common in mid-century British collections; it carries no documented origin. The grouping of three unrelated preparations under one head is characteristic of how such compilations were assembled, though nothing on the page shows who supplied them. Veal appears far more often in English cookery of the period than on tables now, and its bland flesh and gelatinous bones made it a natural choice for anything meant to be eaten cold and firm.