Season a 6-pound veal-roast with salt and pepper and rub well with butter; put in the dripping-pan with one large sliced onion, 1 bay-leaf, 2 sprigs of parsley and 2 of thyme and sage. Add ½ teaspoonful each of cloves, allspice and mace. Pour in 1 cup of hot water and the juice of a lemon and dredge with flour; add a tablespoonful of butter. Let bake until brown and tender. Baste often with the sauce and serve.
A plain braise-roast that leaves out the two things a modern cook wants most: the oven temperature and the time. Both are recoverable from the method.
- Oven and timeThe recipe names neither temperature nor time. A steady 325F is a workable modern setting for an open dripping-pan roast; a 6-pound bone-in veal roast will take roughly 2 to 2 1/2 hours at that heat. Go by internal temperature rather than the clock.
- DonenessVeal is a whole-muscle cut and should come out at 145F internal with a three-minute rest. "Brown and tender" in a book of this date likely meant a good deal further cooked than that.
- The cutA 6-pound veal roast of this kind was most likely shoulder, leg or breast. Shoulder is the best modern match and benefits from the liquid; a loin roast would be wasted here.
- The hinge: keep liquid in the panOne cup of water under a 6-pound roast will cook away long before the meat is done. Check every 30 to 40 minutes and top up with hot water or stock, or the flour and drippings will scorch and the "sauce" will be bitter.
- SpicesHalf a teaspoonful each of cloves, allspice and mace is assertive by current taste, and pre-ground cloves have not softened since. A quarter teaspoon of cloves is enough for most palates; the mace and allspice can stand as written.
- Dredge with flourThis most likely means dusting the buttered surface of the meat rather than the pan. The flour that falls into the drippings will help thicken them. The recipe adds a further tablespoonful of butter to the pan without saying why.
- CoveringThe original leaves the pan uncovered and says nothing about oven heat. In a dry modern oven, covering loosely with foil for the first two-thirds and uncovering to brown will help keep the meat and the pan sauce from drying out.
- YieldSix pounds bone-in serves eight to ten. Strain the pan juices and skim the fat before serving; the lemon and onion will have broken down into a thin, sharp gravy that wants a final check for salt.
The "of all nations" labelling in cookbooks of this period worked largely by association rather than authenticity: a dish became Spanish because it carried lemon, onion and a heavy hand with cloves, allspice and mace. There is nothing here that a Spanish cook of the period would have recognised as a national dish, but the combination of a lean roast, a little water and long basting reflects real kitchen practice on both sides of the Atlantic when meat was tough and ovens were unreliable. Veal was more common on American tables then than now, dairy herds producing bull calves that had to go somewhere. The daily-dish format, one recipe for each day of the year, was a popular publishing conceit of the era.