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Veal with Clams
2 cups chopped veal 1 tablespoonful butter 1 cup chopped clams Salt and pepper 4 tablespoonfuls clamjuice cup well-seasoned mashed potato Put Mix veal, clams, and juice, then season. mixture in buttered ramekins. Cover with mashed potato. Dot with bits of butter. Bake fifteen minutes in hot oven. 1 cup chopped clams 4 tablespoonfuls clam-. Salt and pepper juice. 1/2 cup well-seasoned mashed potato.
A leftover-veal dish built on the same logic as a clam pie: shellfish liquor supplies the moisture and most of the seasoning. The text as printed is jumbled by the original typesetting, and one quantity is incomplete.
- Read the garbled line in orderThe instructions were scrambled in printing. The intended sequence is: mix veal, clams and clam juice; season; put the mixture in buttered ramekins; cover with mashed potato; dot with butter; bake.
- "Hot oven"In books of this period usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F, though the text gives no figure. Fifteen minutes is only enough to heat the filling through and colour the potato crust.
- The potato quantity is incompleteThe original reads "cup well-seasoned mashed potato" with the fraction lost. Judge by eye: enough to cap the ramekins in a thin layer.
- ClamsA cup of chopped clams means shucked meats, chopped, from about two dozen small hard-shells; drained chopped canned clams work and their liquor covers the four tablespoons of juice. Bottled clam juice is a fallback.
- Season with restraintClam liquor is markedly salty, and the potato is already "well-seasoned." Salt at the end, if at all; pepper and a little mace or thyme are more use here.
- Do not extend the bakingClams toughen quickly. Fifteen minutes at high heat is the whole margin; if the tops are not browning, run them briefly under the broiler rather than leaving them in longer.
- YieldAbout three cups of filling, which will fill roughly four small ramekins, depending on their size.
- Reheated meatChopped rather than ground veal gives the right texture. The recipe does not say whether the veal is cooked, though the fifteen-minute bake assumes it is; use already-cooked meat. Let the filling lose its refrigerator chill before it goes in the oven so the centres heat through in the short bake.
Books of "left overs" were a small publishing genre in the United States between about 1890 and 1920, when a household roast was large, refrigeration was an icebox, and wasting cooked meat was treated as a moral failing as much as an economic one. Veal appears often in these collections because its mildness takes on whatever it is mixed with, which is exactly why clams are useful here: the liquor does the seasoning that the meat cannot. Small individual ramekins, baked and served in the same dish, were fashionable in this period precisely because they let a cook stretch a cupful of scraps into something that arrived at the table looking deliberate rather than salvaged. The pairing of veal and shellfish is old and widespread rather than traceable to any one kitchen.