Season a veal loin roast with salt and pepper and rub with butter. Put in the dripping-pan with sliced onions, tomatoes and parsley and 2 tablespoonfuls of dripping. Let roast; baste often until tender. Serve hot or cold, cut into thin slices.
May 26 — No. 26
English
A bare-bones roast of the kind these daily-dish books favoured: no oven temperature, no weight, no time. The gaps are all fillable if you know what a veal loin wants.
- DrippingBeef dripping, the fat rendered from a previous roast, was a standing kitchen ingredient. Any neutral fat or clarified butter stands in; beef dripping is still sold and gives the closest flavour.
- Dripping-panA shallow open roasting pan set under or beside the meat. Use a low-sided roasting tin so the onions and tomatoes brown rather than steam.
- Oven heatStart at 425F for 15-20 minutes to colour the surface and the vegetables, then drop to 325F for the rest. A single blazing oven will scorch the tomatoes long before the loin is done.
- The hinge: internal temperatureVeal loin is lean and unforgiving. The recommended safe finished temperature is 145F with a rest; cooks who prefer it faintly pink pull nearer 140F and let carry-over do the rest, though that is below the official figure. "Roast until tender" applied to a shoulder or breast, not a loin; taken to the falling-apart stage a loin is simply dry.
- TimingAllow a good twenty-plus minutes per pound at 325F for a bone-in loin after the initial blast, but the thermometer decides.
- BastingVeal renders very little fat of its own, so the frequent basting the recipe asks for is doing real work. If the pan runs dry, add a splash of stock rather than more butter, and the pan juices with the collapsed onion and tomato become the sauce with no further thickening.
- Yield and the cold serviceA 4 lb loin serves six hot. The instruction to serve cold in thin slices is not an afterthought; veal sets firm and slices cleanly, and a second-day cold platter with the jellied juices would have been welcome.
Roast veal was a middle-class English Sunday joint through the nineteenth century, often said to sit a step below beef in prestige and a step above mutton in delicacy, and it was prized precisely because it ate as well cold as hot. The onions, tomatoes and parsley strewn in the pan suggest this is unlikely to be an early recipe: tomatoes only became an unremarkable English kitchen ingredient in the last decades of the 1800s, once tinned and imported fruit made them cheap. The book's format, one dish a day from a different country, has loose national labels; there is nothing distinctively English here beyond the joint itself, the dripping and the assumption that a cold sliced roast is a meal in its own right.