No. 1544

Round Bottom of Veal, Minced, Sicilian

Sous-noix de Veau Emince a la Sicilienne

Minces are made with cold meats cut in slices a quarter of an inch thick; pare them either round or oval, suppressing the fat and trimming them neatly. Dress either in a circle or in a straight line, pour over some clear gravy (No. 404) and cover over with another smaller dish, then heat the whole in a slack oven. The meat must be thoroughly warmed without allowing the liquid to boil; drain this off and serve with a Sicilian sauce (No. 542).

← No. 1543 Round Bottom Fricandeau of Veal Glazed with Veal No. 1545 Saddle of Veal and Chopped Lettuce-Larded →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a reheating method rather than a cooking method: Ranhofer assumes you have a cold roast or braised veal cushion sitting in the larder and want to serve it as a hot dish. Everything depends on warming the meat without cooking it a second time.

The hinge: no boilingOnce the gravy simmers, the already-cooked veal tightens and turns dry and stringy. Keep the liquid below a shiver, and pull the dish the moment the slices are warmed through.
Slack ovenA slack oven is the coolest working range of a range oven, generally taken to be somewhere around 250-300F; the book itself gives no temperature and no time. How long the slices need will depend on their thickness and how cold the meat is when it goes in.
Sous-noix de veauThe noix is the veal cushion, the large muscle of the inner leg; the sous-noix is the under-cushion beneath it, sold today as part of the top round or silverside. Any lean cold roast veal will behave the same way here.
Emincé does not mean mincedDespite the English title, nothing is ground. Emincé is thinly sliced, and Ranhofer specifies a quarter inch, thick enough that the slices hold together when lifted with a fork.
The cross-referencesNo. 404 is a clear brown gravy or jus, and No. 542 is the Sicilian sauce, both given elsewhere in the book. Any well-reduced brown veal jus stands in for the first; without No. 542 in front of you, a brown sauce sharpened with tomato is the closest general substitute, though the book's own version should be consulted.
The covering dishInverting a smaller dish over the meat traps steam and keeps the exposed edges from drying and darkening. A sheet of foil pressed to the rim does the same job.
Draining before saucingThe text says only to drain the warming liquid off before the Sicilian sauce goes on, and does not say what becomes of it. That gravy will have picked up meat juices, so straining and reducing it is one option, but the book does not direct it.
Reheating leftoversCooked meat held for a day or more should reach 165F at the centre when reheated. A slack oven will get there comfortably; it simply takes longer than a hot one.
YieldNo quantity is given, and the text offers no guide to portions. Dress the slices overlapping in a ring or a straight line as it directs.

A Little History

Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the economics behind a grand restaurant menu as clearly as any dish in the book: a large veal cushion roasted for one service reappears the next day as a composed hot plate under a named sauce. French kitchens of the period had a whole vocabulary for such dishes -- émincé, miroton, salmis, hachis -- and treated them as legitimate cookery rather than leftovers, since the reheating method and the sauce were what defined them. Sauces styled à la sicilienne in nineteenth-century French practice are often said to have carried tomato and a southern accent, which may be why the name attaches to a brown, sharp sauce here. The instruction to cover the meat with a second inverted dish is a reminder of how a cook might improvise a cloche from what was to hand.