Home › Meats › Fillet of Veal Boiled
Fillet of Veal Boiled
Secure it with tape, put it into a cloth well floured, and in cold water; let the meat simmer at least four hours.
Serve with Bechamel or oyster sauce.
A bare-bones instruction of the sort that assumed a cook already knew how to handle a large joint. The whole method hinges on holding the meat at a bare simmer, not a boil, and on stopping well short of the four hours suggested.
- What "fillet of veal" meantIn British and American usage of this period the fillet is the boned, rolled top of the leg (the round), not the tenderloin. Ask a butcher for a boned and tied veal leg roast of 3-4 lb; a 2 lb piece of loin will overcook long before any of these times are up.
- Tape and cloth"Tape" is flat cotton kitchen tape, used to bind a rolled joint so it holds its shape; butcher's twine does the same job. The floured cloth is the same sort of cloth used for boiled puddings, wrapped around the meat -- most likely to keep the surface pale and to stop scum settling on it, though the recipe does not say. A double layer of well-rinsed muslin, floured, works, or you can skip it and skim the pot instead.
- Cut the timeFour hours at a simmer turns a veal leg grey and stringy. Start it in cold salted water, bring it slowly to just below a simmer, and cook at 175-180F, allowing roughly 20-25 minutes per pound. Pull it at an internal temperature of 145-150F and rest it 15 minutes before slicing.
- Never let it boilA rolling boil squeezes the juices out of lean veal and clouds the liquid. The surface should barely tremble. If you have a thermometer, keep the water between 170 and 180F throughout.
- Season the waterThe original says only cold water. Veal is mild to the point of blandness poached plain; add salt, an onion, a carrot, a few peppercorns and a bay leaf. The strained liquid is then worth keeping.
- The sauce is the pointUse a ladle of the poaching liquid to make the Bechamel, or to loosen it, so the sauce tastes of the meat. For oyster sauce, add shucked oysters at the very end and let them heat through for about two minutes only; longer and they toughen.
- YieldA 3-4 lb rolled joint serves six to eight. It slices best barely warm, and it is good cold.
Boiling large joints of veal was standard practice in nineteenth-century English and Anglo-American kitchens, where pale meat was prized and roasting was hard to control over an open fire; the steadiness of a slow pot compared with a spit is often given as the reason. The floured cloth belongs to the same aesthetic, its purpose being to keep the meat as white as possible, which is also why the accompanying sauces are white ones. Bechamel had entered English cookbooks from French practice generations earlier, though English books of the period generally distinguish plain white sauce from the richer bechamel; oyster sauce here means real oysters stirred into that sauce, not the bottled condiment sold under the name today, and it reflects a period when oysters were cheap enough to be treated as a garnish for meat rather than a luxury. The extreme brevity of the entry expected the reader to supply the judgement the text left out.