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May 3
Menu: Normandy Soup; Veal Loaf, Brown Sauce; String Beans Baked Tomatoes; Mexican Salad; Cheese Fingers; Vanilla Ice Cream Strawberry Tarts; Coffee Veal Loaf-1 pound cold roast veal finely chopped, 1/2 pound sausage meat, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons breadcrumbs, 1/2 cup stock or gravy, 1 egg, salt and pepper to taste. Mix veal, sausage meat, Crisco, and breadcrumbs together, season liberally with salt and pepper, and add egg. Mix thoroughly and add gravy or stock gradually until it is thoroughly moistened. Form into a short thick roll, cover lightly with flour, or, when economy is not an object, coat with egg and breadcrumbs. Bake in moderate oven for 1 hour, basting occasionally with hot Crisco, and serve hot with brown sauce.
A leftovers dish: cold roast veal from an earlier meal, bound with raw sausage meat and baked as a free-form loaf. It works, but a few of the original's assumptions need translating.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F. An hour at that heat is about right for a loaf of this size, but the sausage meat goes in raw, so cook to an internal temperature of 160F at the centre rather than by the clock.
- Cold roast vealThe recipe assumes yesterday's roast. A pound of cooked veal, chopped fine by hand rather than run through a processor, keeps some texture; ground raw veal will give a denser, more meatloaf-like result and needs the same finish temperature.
- CriscoStill sold, and still a hydrogenated vegetable shortening, though the formula was reworked in the 2000s to cut trans fats. Two tablespoons worked into the meat is there for moisture, since cold roast veal is lean and dry. Butter or lard does the same job.
- Sausage meatBulk pork sausage, uncased and unseasoned or lightly seasoned. It supplies the fat and much of the binding. Avoid heavily spiced breakfast sausage unless you want it to dominate.
- BreadcrumbsFour tablespoons is a modest amount; dry crumbs will absorb more of the stock than fresh. Add the liquid gradually as instructed and stop when the mixture holds a shape without weeping.
- Forming and bastingShape on a shallow baking tray, not in a loaf tin; the recipe wants a browned crust on all sides. The instruction is only to baste "occasionally" with hot fat, which in practice means every 15 to 20 minutes; a loose foil tent for the first half does much the same with less attention.
- Brown sauceA period brown sauce means a roux-based gravy built on veal or beef stock — essentially espagnole, or simply the pan drippings deglazed and thickened. It is not optional here; the loaf is lean and wants it.
- YieldClose to two pounds of mixture once the crumbs, egg and stock are counted, serving four as a main course. The recipe directs that it be served hot.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, was a promotional cookbook built to persuade American cooks that a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening could replace butter and lard in every part of the meal hence the appearance of two tablespoons of Crisco inside a veal loaf. The book's dated menu material, associated with the "A Calendar of Dinners with 615 Recipes" issues of the Crisco book, presents this loaf as the kind of dish a careful household produced from Sunday's roast: cold meat rescued with fresh fat, crumbs and an egg, then dressed up with a brown sauce so it reads as a course rather than a remnant. Veal was cheaper and far more commonly eaten in the American kitchen of 1913 than it is now, and the assumption that a pound of cold roast simply exists in the larder says a good deal about how households of the period cooked in sequence rather than in single meals.