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Veal Rolls
Cut the veal in slices, spread each one with the stuffing left from the roast, or with bread-crumbs seasoned and moistened with butter, roll up tightly and tie. Roll with flour, sprinkle with salt and pepper, brown slowly in hot butter, then half cover with rich milk or veal stock in which one teaspoonful of flour has been blended, simmer ten minutes. Remove the strings and serve on hot toast.
A leftover-roast dish that behaves like a quick braise: the veal is already cooked, so everything after browning is about heating through and building a small sauce. Cut the slices thick enough to survive rolling and tying.
- Slice thicknessCut cold roast veal about 1/4 inch thick and as wide as the joint allows; thinner slices tear when rolled and tied. If the meat crumbles, overlap two pieces before spreading the stuffing.
- "Roll with flour"This means dredge, not roll up again. Turn the tied rolls in seasoned flour so they take colour and so the coating helps thicken the pan liquid.
- The stuffingLeftover roast stuffing is the intended filling. If it has been sitting in the refrigerator more than a couple of days, or was left out at room temperature after the roast, make the substitute instead: soft breadcrumbs, salt, pepper, a little sage or parsley, and melted butter to bind.
- TyingCotton kitchen twine, two loops per roll, snug but not cutting in. Wooden toothpicks work and are quicker to remove, though they scorch a little in the pan.
- Browning slowlyButter alone over moderate heat, turning to colour all sides; the meat is cooked already, so the browning is purely for flavour and it will burn the butter if the pan runs too hot.
- "Rich milk"Whole milk or half-and-half. Blend the teaspoonful of flour into the cold liquid before it goes in the pan or it will lump. Veal stock gives a cleaner sauce; milk gives something closer to a gravy.
- Ten minutes is rightLong enough to heat the rolls through to steaming and let the sauce thicken. Cooked veal simmered much beyond that dries out and the rolls begin to shed their filling.
- Yield and servingRoughly two rolls per person on toast, from about a pound of leftover roast. Spoon the pan sauce over; the toast is there to take it up, so cut it thick and toast it dry.
The Cook Book of Left Overs belongs to a large family of early twentieth-century American manuals built entirely around thrift, published in an era when a Sunday roast was expected to reappear at the table in some altered form for several days. Veal rolls are a domestic descendant of the stuffed-and-rolled meat preparations found across European cookery — the French paupiette, the Italian involtino, the German Rouladen — but with the sequence reversed: those are made from raw meat pounded thin, while this version takes cold cooked slices and reassembles them into something that reads as a fresh dish. The instruction to use "the stuffing left from the roast" is the clearest sign of the book's purpose, treating one leftover as the seasoning for another. Serving on toast was a common way to handle a small quantity of sauce, and it stretched the meat further, which was very much the point.