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To Use the Veal
To prepare the meat, is by chopping it fine with a head of crisp lettuce and mixing with a salad dressing. This makes a nice dish to serve cold for a supper relish.
This is a two-sentence coda to a soup recipe rather than a standalone dish: the veal in question is the meat that has already given up its flavour to the stockpot. It works, but it needs help the original does not mention.
- What "the veal" isThe title implies this uses veal already cooked in an earlier recipe; if it was boiled for broth it will have given up much of its savour and moisture. Treat it as a texture ingredient and build the flavour back in through the dressing and seasoning, salting it properly before mixing.
- "Salad dressing" in 1900"Salad dressing" -- In American books of this period the term often means a cooked or boiled dressing — egg yolks, vinegar, mustard, a little flour or cream, thickened over hot water — as well as a mayonnaise. Either works here; a boiled dressing is sharper and clings better to dry meat.
- ProportionsRoughly equal volumes of chopped meat and shredded lettuce, bound with about a third of a cup of dressing per two cups of meat. About a pound of cooked veal serves four as a supper dish.
- Chop, do not mince"Chopping it fine" means knife work to a coarse dice. A food processor turns boiled veal to paste in seconds, which is not what is wanted.
- Dress the lettuce lateCrisp lettuce cut into a dressed mixture wilts quickly. Dress the meat, chill it, and fold in the lettuce just before it goes to the table.
- Keeping itCooked meat that has been cooled, handled and dressed should be refrigerated at once and eaten within two days.
- Worth addingCelery, capers, a little chopped pickle or onion, and plenty of black pepper are period-appropriate and address the blandness directly.
Entries like this one are the quiet economy of the nineteenth-century kitchen made visible: nothing is thrown out, and the meat left behind by one dish becomes the basis of another. Veal was common on American tables in 1900 in a way it is not now, and veal was cheap, mild and considered suitable for invalids and light suppers. Cold chopped-meat salads bound with a boiled dressing were a staple of the supper table, the informal evening meal that followed a heavy midday dinner, and chicken salad, lobster salad and veal salad all belong to the same family. The instruction is written telegraphically because the author assumed the reader already knew how to make the dressing.