Home › Meats › Fillet of Veal to Roast
Fillet of Veal to Roast
Remove the bone. Prepare a stuffing of bread crumbs and fat salt pork; or, if you prefer it, butter and egg; salt, pepper and sweet herbs, minced fine and well mixed. Stuff the place whence the bone was taken, and skewer the flap over the stuffing at one end. Fasten the other end with a skewer. Larder the outside of the meat with fat ham or salt pork. Put a little water into the pan with a little salt. Let the meat be well basted while cooking and see that it is thoroughly done. When cooked, baste it with butter, and serve it with sliced lemon.
A boned and stuffed roast from the leg of veal, written for a cook who was expected to judge the fire by eye. The instructions leave out both temperature and time, so those are the two things worth settling before you start.
- What "fillet of veal" meansNot the tenderloin. In older butchery the fillet is the round of the hind leg, sold today as a boneless veal top round or leg roast, typically 4-6 lb. Ask for it boned and with the flap left on, since the flap is what folds over the stuffing.
- "Larder" is lardEvidently meant as lard: threading strips of fat pork or ham through the surface of the lean meat with a larding needle. Veal leg is very lean and dries out, so the fat is functional rather than decorative. Barding — tying sheets of pork fat or bacon over the outside — does much the same work with less equipment.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Start at 425F for about 20 minutes to colour the outside, then drop to 325F for the remainder. A stuffed 5 lb leg roast will take roughly 2 to 2.5 hours at that lower heat.
- "Thoroughly done"Period cooks took veal well past the point most people want now. Pull it at 145-150F in the thickest part of the meat and rest it 15-20 minutes; the stuffing should read 165F. Anything beyond about 160F in the meat turns the round grey and fibrous.
- Sweet herbsUsually some combination of parsley, thyme, marjoram or savory, sometimes a little sage. Use about a quarter cup minced fresh herbs to four cups of crumbs.
- The two stuffingsSalt pork chopped into the crumbs gives fat and salt at once; butter and egg gives a firmer, more cake-like forcemeat that slices cleanly. If you use salt pork, cut back the added salt sharply. Either way keep the mixture loose — packed stuffing in a boned joint compresses into a solid plug.
- Water in the panA shallow film only, an inch at most, topped up if it threatens to scorch. Its job is to keep the drippings from burning and to give you basting liquid; too much and the underside of the roast steams.
- Skewers and stringMetal skewers work, but butcher's twine tied at inch-and-a-half intervals holds a boned leg in a better shape and is easier to remove at the table.
- ServingA 5 lb roast serves eight to ten. The lemon is probably more than decoration — the acid cuts the pork fat and the rich pan drippings, and the slices can be squeezed over.
Boned, stuffed and larded leg of veal was a set piece of nineteenth-century English and American cooking. Its logic is entirely about the meat: veal leg is lean, mild and prone to drying, so the cook compensated at every step — fat pork threaded through the flesh, a fat-enriched forcemeat in the cavity, constant basting, butter at the finish, and lemon to lift the whole thing at the table. Veal was also comparatively cheap and abundant in an era when dairy herds produced far more bull calves than any farm could keep, and cookbooks of the period carry veal recipes in quantity.