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Blanquette of Veal and Ham
Cut one and one-half pounds of cooked veal into pieces, and mix it with one-half pound of cooked ham, also cut into pieces. Put the meat into a saucepan with one pint of cream sauce, one teaspoonful of lemon juice, a small quantity each of pepper and salt, and boil it. When boiling, move the saucepan to the side of the fire, add the yolks of two eggs that have been beaten with one teacupful of milk, and stir by the side of the fire for a few minutes. Turn the blanquette out onto a hot dish, garnish with slices of hard-boiled eggs, and serve.
Blanquette of Veal with Mushrooms in Croustade.
Cut some cold roasted fillet of veal into collops one and one-half inch in diameter, and one-fourth of an inch thick, slice one-fourth of the quantity of mushrooms, and mix them with the veal in some allemande sauce. Prepare a paste croustade two inches high, and the same size as the dish on which it is to be served, make the blanquette hot, turn it into the croustade, and serve.
Two related dishes from the Waldorf's repertoire of made-over roast meat, both built on the principle that a white stew should never brown and never boil once thickened with egg.
- The hinge: do not boil after the liaisonOnce the beaten yolks and milk go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer or the yolks scramble and the blanquette turns grainy. "Move the saucepan to the side of the fire" means pull it off direct heat; on a modern hob, drop to the lowest setting and stir for two or three minutes until the sauce coats a spoon.
- Cream sauceA pint is about 2 cups. In this period "cream sauce" generally means a white roux-based sauce made with milk and/or cream; it should be thick enough to nap the meat before the yolks go in, since the liaison thickens it further.
- TeacupfulGenuinely imprecise in this period; period sources put a teacup at anywhere from roughly 4 to 6 fluid ounces, less than a full measuring cup. Err on the smaller side, as too much milk will thin the sauce past the point the yolks can recover it.
- Cooked vealThis is a leftovers dish: the meat goes into the pan already cooked. Poached or roast veal shoulder works; the meat is already tender, so it needs only to be heated through, not stewed.
- Allemande sauceIn the second dish, allemande is a velouté (white stock and roux) finished with egg yolks, cream and lemon — the same liaison, made in advance. The same rule applies: it must not boil once the yolks are in.
- Collops and croustadeA collop is simply a small slice of meat. The croustade here is a straight-sided pastry case, two inches high and matched to the serving dish; a deep tart shell or a large vol-au-vent case does the same job.
- SeasoningCream sauce and ham will flatten quickly. Taste for salt only after the ham is in; note that the recipe adds the lemon juice with the sauce, before boiling.
- YieldTwo pounds of meat in two cups of sauce serves four to six as a main course with rice or boiled potatoes, more if it goes into pastry cases as a first course.
A French blanquette de veau as it is now understood is a stew of raw veal gently poached in a white stock, the cooking liquor then turned into a sauce and bound with egg yolks and cream, with nothing browned at any stage. What is given here is a hotel and household variant: the same white sauce and the same yolk liaison applied to meat already cooked, a way of turning yesterday's roast fillet and a piece of ham into a dish that could be sent out under its own name. Made-over dishes of this kind fill a large part of late nineteenth-century American cookery books. The egg-and-cream liaison is the oldest element in the recipe, a thickening technique older than the roux in French cooking and one that survives in allemande, poulette and the blanquette alike.