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Montglas of Veal with Croutons
Trim off all the sinewy parts of a cooked minion fillet of veal, cut it into slices about one-fourth of an inch thick, then cut them into small squares. Put the veal into a saucepan with half its quantity of cooked pickled tongue and mushrooms also cut into small pieces. Pour one-half pint of brown sauce and one wineglassful of Madeira wine over the above ingredients, season with a little cayenne pepper and keep it on the fire until on the point of boiling, then move it to the side. Turn the montglas onto a hot dish, garnish with glazed croutons of fried bread, and serve.
Braised Neck of Veal with Truffles Trim a neck of veal, that part used for cutlets, cut the bone off short and lard it with black truffles in such a way as to resemble a draught-board. Braise the meat with plenty of bacon on the top, so that it will retain its white color, and glaze the meat slightly. Put the meat on a hot dish, cover it with Italian sauce and truffles, and serve.
Neck of Veal, St. Clair Style.
Roast a nicely-trimmed end of a neck of veal in vegetables; when nearly cooked remove the paper and vegetables and brown it lightly. Peel and boil a sufficient quantity of potatoes, mash them with butter and press them into a border mould. Stand the mould in a bain marie to keep hot. Make about one pint of thin tomato sauce, and mix with it one-half teaspoonful of anchovy butter. Cut a dozen slices of bacon into heart-shaped pieces and fry them. Place the veal on a hot dish, garnish with the slices of bacon, and serve with the sauce in a sauceboat.
Three veal preparations run together on this page; the first, the montglas, is essentially a warm salpicon and takes ten minutes if the components are already cooked. The hinge is temperature: the mixture is brought only to the point of boiling and then pulled aside.
- Minion filletAn anglicization of filet mignon — here the veal tenderloin, cooked in advance. Any cold cooked lean veal will behave the same way; the point is that it is firm enough to cut into clean quarter-inch dice.
- Half a pint, one wineglassfulHalf a pint is one cup (about 240 ml). A wineglassful in kitchen writing of this period is roughly 2 fl oz, a quarter cup — enough Madeira to perfume the sauce without thinning it.
- Brown sauceMost likely an espagnole or demi-glace: brown sauce reduced with stock until it coats a spoon. A modern reduced veal or beef stock, thickened by reduction, gives the right gloss.
- Pickled tongueCured, cooked tongue, usually beef, still available at good butchers. It supplies the salt and the pink colour in the dish; taste before adding any salt of your own.
- Do not let it boilOnce diced veal boils in sauce it goes dry and stringy, and the Madeira loses its aroma. Bring the pan just to a shiver, then move it off the heat — the whole point of the instruction to "keep it on the fire until on the point of boiling."
- Glazed croutonsTriangles or hearts of fried bread, brushed with a little reduced meat glaze so they shine. They are structural as much as decorative: the montglas is soft, and the croutons give it something to be spooned onto.
- Quantities and yieldNo amount of veal is given. A pound of cooked veal with half a pound of tongue and mushrooms combined suits the half-pint of sauce and would serve about four as a course.
- The two veal necks that follow"Larding with truffles" means inserting batons of truffle into the meat with a larding needle. The bacon laid over the braised neck is barding, to keep the veal pale rather than to flavour it, and the border mould in the St. Clair recipe is a ring mould of mashed potato held warm in a water bath.
A garnish à la Montglas is a fixed thing in classical French cookery: a salpicon — small even dice — of tongue, mushroom, truffle and often foie gras, bound with a Madeira-scented demi-glace, used to fill vol-au-vents, tartlets, timbales and omelettes. The name is generally traced to the Marquis de Montglas, one of the aristocratic titles that attached themselves to garnishes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and survived long after anyone remembered the man. Oscar Tschirky's version is a simpler one: it drops the truffle and foie gras and serves the salpicon on its own as a dish, built from cooked veal and cooked tongue, with fried bread to make it look composed.