Season a breast of veal with salt, pepper and ginger. Heat a cupful of dripping; lay the meat in the stew-pan with the dripping, 1 onion, some celery seed, carroway seed, a few peppercorns and parsley. Cover and let stew slowly until nearly done; then add 1 cup of tomato-sauce and cook slowly until tender. Serve with baked potatoes.
A plain braise with no times, temperatures or quantities beyond the dripping and tomato sauce. The technique is sound; what it needs is a clock and a clear idea of the cut.
- The hinge: keep it barely simmeringVeal breast is a collagen-heavy cut that turns stringy if boiled and tender only if held just below a simmer. A covered pot at the lowest steady bubble, or a 300F oven, will get there; a rolling boil will not.
- Breast of vealAsk the butcher for a bone-in veal breast, roughly 4-5 lb, or a boneless rolled one around 3 lb. Boneless veal shoulder or a chuck-style roast behaves much the same way if breast is unavailable. Figure 2 1/2 to 3 hours total before it yields to a fork.
- A cupful of drippingBeef or pork dripping, saved from roasting. That is a great deal of fat for one pan; a quarter cup of any neutral fat or lard is plenty, and the recipe loses nothing. Note that the original does not brown the meat first -- it goes into the pan with the aromatics from the start.
- Stew-panA heavy lidded pot just wide enough to hold the meat, Dutch oven or braiser. The dish relies on a tight cover, since almost no liquid is added at the start and the meat must cook in its own steam.
- Carroway and celery seedCaraway, spelled as it often was in older American books. About a teaspoon of caraway and half a teaspoon of celery seed suits this size of roast; both are assertive, and the caraway is what gives the dish its central-European accent.
- Tomato-sauceIn cookbooks of this period this meant a cooked, seasoned sauce made from tomatoes, not a jar of pasta sauce and not tomato ketchup. A cup of plain canned tomato puree loosened with a little stock is the closest modern stand-in.
- "Nearly done" then the sauceThe tomato goes in late, as the recipe directs. Braise 2 hours or so first, then add the sauce and continue until a fork slides in without resistance, another 30 to 45 minutes.
- Yield and servingA bone-in breast serves four to six. Slice against the grain, skim the fat from the pan juices, and spoon them over. The baked potatoes are there to take the sauce.
The "Swiss" here has little to do with Switzerland. In American usage swiss came to be used as a verb for pounding and slow-braising a tough cut, the sense preserved in swiss steak, and the term is often traced to swissing, a textile-finishing word for rolling cloth smooth between rollers -- though that derivation is a proposed one rather than a settled fact, and this recipe involves no pounding. Books of this kind, arranged as a dish a day under national labels, leaned on such loose attributions; a caraway-scented veal braise reads more Austrian or south-German than alpine, and April 2 in the same volume is a German prune pudding. Veal breast was a cheap cut in the period, bony and fatty and unsuited to roasting, so it went into covered pots with dripping and seeds from the spice drawer. The instruction to serve with baked potatoes rather than a starch cooked in the sauce is a small marker of the American kitchen doing the interpreting.