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Veal Scallop with Oysters
To every cup of finely chopped veal allow twelve good-sized oysters. Season the meat highly with salt, paprika, and one teaspoonful of lemon-juice.
Moisten it with a little stock. Arrange in layers in a baking-dish beginning with the veal, and sprinkle some well - buttered cracker - crumbs between each layer and on top. Add one-half cup thin cream or milk, and one-half cup of strained oyster liquor, to each measure of veal. Bake in a hot oven about fifteen minutes.
A leftover-veal scallop of the standard American type: chopped meat, oysters and buttered crumbs in layers, bound with cream and oyster liquor. The proportions are given per cup of veal, so it scales to whatever you have.
- "Scallop" means the methodHere it refers to a layered, crumb-topped bake, not the thin cutlet a modern cook calls a veal scallop or scaloppine. The recipe does not say so outright, but the short bake implies the chopped veal is already cooked, as in most scallops of this type.
- Hot ovenRoughly 400-450F; the text gives no temperature and the term was inexact. The short bake depends on the oven being genuinely hot.
- Keep it shallowFifteen minutes only heats through if the dish is no more than about two inches deep. In a deep casserole the oysters at the bottom will still be cold when the crumbs on top have browned.
- The oysters set the timingShucked oysters need only two or three minutes of real heat before their edges curl and they firm up. Everything else in the dish is already cooked, so the bake is essentially about browning the crumbs and warming the whole through.
- Oyster liquorThat is the liquid in the shucking container or the shell, strained through a fine sieve or cheesecloth to catch grit and shell fragments. If a half cup per measure of veal is short, top up with the cream rather than with water.
- Cracker crumbsCrushed common crackers or saltines, tossed with melted butter until every crumb is coated. Dry crumbs on top will scorch in a hot oven.
- Stock for moistening"A little" means just enough to keep the chopped veal from being dry and crumbly, a tablespoon or two per cup. The cream and oyster liquor supply the rest of the liquid.
- Twelve good-sized oystersSelects or larger, about 3/4 cup of shucked meats per cup of veal. Smaller oysters in the same count will leave the dish meat-heavy.
- YieldA cup of chopped veal with its dozen oysters serves two as a main course, so scale by the cup for the number you are feeding.
Scalloped dishes - anything layered with buttered crumbs and baked in a shallow vessel - were the workhorse of American leftover cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and books devoted entirely to using up cold meat were a small publishing genre in their own right. The oysters here are not a luxury flourish: before the depletion of the fisheries of the Chesapeake and Long Island Sound, which was already well under way in the late nineteenth century, oysters were cheap, sold by the quart in barrels well inland by rail, and were routinely used the way a cook today might use mushrooms or bacon, to give body and savour to something plain. Pairing them with cold veal solves a specific problem, since roast veal reheats badly on its own and turns dry and grey; the oyster liquor and cream put the moisture back, and the paprika and lemon juice cover the flatness that cooked meat picks up after a day in the larder.