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Veal and Potato Puff
Season two cups of finely chopped veal with salt, paprika, and one tablespoonful catsup.
Moisten with a little gravy or stock. Have ready two cups of well - seasoned mashed potato, add to them the yolks of two eggs, and beat until very light and creamy. Fold in the stiffly beaten whites of the two eggs. Butter a baking-dish, and cover the bottom with half of the potato, spread all of the meat on top, and cover with the rest of the potato. Brown in hot oven.
1 egg
A tidy way to stretch a small amount of cooked veal into a supper dish, built like a shepherd's pie but lightened with beaten egg white. The whole thing depends on the potato going in while the whites are still full of air.
- Work fast with the whitesOnce the beaten whites are folded into the potato, the mixture starts to deflate. Have the dish buttered and the meat seasoned before you touch the eggs, and get it into the oven immediately.
- Oven temperature"Hot oven" in books of this period is usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F. The recipe gives no time; watch it rather than the clock, as the object is only to set the puff and brown the top, and a long, cool bake will dry the veal.
- Potato consistencyThe mashed potato needs to be stiff and fairly dry, riced rather than whipped with milk, or it will not hold the air. Warm potato takes the yolks better than cold.
- The meat must be moist, not wet"Moisten with a little gravy or stock" means just enough to loosen the chopped veal. Too much and the liquid soaks into the potato layers and the puff collapses.
- CatsupTomato ketchup of this period was generally thinner and sharper, with less sugar, than the modern kind. A tablespoon of plain tomato passata with a dash of vinegar comes closer, though ordinary ketchup works.
- Reheating cooked meat safelyReheating cooked meat -- The recipe does not say whether the veal is cooked or raw. If you are using cooked left-over veal, the finished dish should be hot all through when it comes out; the potato insulates the filling, so do not pull it as soon as the top colours.
- YieldTwo cups of meat and two of potato make roughly four cups of mixture, enough for a moderate baking-dish; it will serve about four with a green vegetable.
Books of left-overs were a distinct genre in American and British publishing from the 1890s through the 1920s, when refrigeration was unreliable and a joint of veal had to be used up within a day or two. The construction here — chopped cooked meat sealed between layers of potato — is the same logic as shepherd's pie and the French hachis parmentier, but the folded egg whites belong to the turn-of-the-century fashion for "puffs" and soufflé-style dishes, a loosely defined family of recipes that let a cook present yesterday's roast as something with pretensions. Veal was far more common on the American table then than now, calves being a byproduct of the dairy herd, and it appears throughout books of this kind precisely because its mild flavour survives a second cooking better than beef or lamb.