Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Spiced Veal
Spiced Veal
Cut some cold lean veal, either fried or baked, into pieces about one inch square. Pour on sufficient scalding-hot vinegar to cover, adding to each pint of the same one dozen whole cloves, one-half stick of cinnamon, one teaspoonful of salt and a small red pepper or a dozen peppercorns. When the vinegar is hot pour it and the spices over the pieces of veal and allow them to stand in the pickle for at least twenty-four hours. It is then ready for use and is excellent when served for cold luncheon or supper.
A leftovers recipe: cooked veal turned into a quick spiced pickle for the cold table. Nothing here is difficult, but two details in the original need translating.
- Start with cooked meatThe veal must already be fried or roasted through — this is a pickle for leftovers, not a cooking method. Cut it into one-inch cubes from a lean roast or cutlet, trimming gristle, since the vinegar will firm the meat and any chewy bit stays chewy.
- Vinegar strengthA pint is two cups, enough to cover a modest quantity of cubed meat in a narrow container. Modern distilled or cider vinegar at 5% acidity may be sharper than some of what was sold in 1896; cider vinegar cut with a little water, or a milder wine vinegar, gives a gentler result.
- "Scalding-hot"Bring the vinegar and spices just to the point of steaming, not a rolling boil. Boiling drives off aroma and fills the kitchen with acrid fumes; open a window regardless.
- The small red pepperA single dried cayenne or bird's-eye chile, left whole. It is there for heat, not for the vinegar to become a hot sauce — remove it after a day if the pickle is getting fierce.
- VesselUse glass, glazed stoneware or stainless steel. Hot vinegar will pick up metallic flavours from aluminium, cast iron or copper, and will strip a tinned pan.
- Where it standsThe recipe assumes a cold larder. Let the jar cool on the counter, then refrigerate for the 24 hours and keep it there; cooked meat held at room temperature for a day is not something to repeat now. Eat it within a few days.
- Serving and yieldThe original gives no yield; scale the spicing by the pint of vinegar as written. Drain the cubes, discard the cloves and cinnamon, and serve with bread and butter, mustard, or a potato salad — the vinegar is the dressing.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms and put his name to this 1896 collection, filled the book with hotel-kitchen thrift alongside its grander dishes, and this is squarely the former: a way of turning the cold end of a roast into something worth putting on a supper table. Spiced or "soused" meats in vinegar with cloves, cinnamon and pepper run back through English and German household cookery long before refrigeration, where acid and spice together bought a few extra days and disguised the flatness of day-old meat. Veal was far more common on American tables then than now, and the cold luncheon and the late supper at which this dish was aimed were fixed points in the social calendar of the hotel's clientele.