Heat 2 tablespoonfuls of olive-oil in a stew-pan; add 2 sliced onions, a clove of garlic and a few capers. Let fry a few minutes. Stir in 1 tablespoonful of flour until brown; add ½ cup of stock; season with salt, pepper, cinnamon, cloves and a pinch of saffron. Add 1 cup of white wine; let boil; then add cooked veal sliced thin. Let cook ten minutes in the sauce and serve very hot.
A quick sauce built to use up leftover roast veal, so most of the work is in the pan sauce rather than the meat. Two points decide the outcome: the roux must actually brown, and the veal goes in only at the very end.
- Start with cooked vealThe recipe assumes you already have roast or braised veal in the refrigerator; nothing here cooks raw meat through. About 1 lb of cold cooked veal, sliced thin, matches this quantity of sauce. Cold roast pork or chicken behaves the same way.
- Ten minutes means reheatingThe veal is already tender. Longer than ten minutes in a wine-based sauce and thin slices go dry and stringy — add them off the boil, at a bare simmer, just until hot through.
- Brown the flour properly"Stir in 1 tablespoonful of flour until brown" is the flavour base, not a thickener alone. Give it two to three minutes over medium heat until it smells nutty and turns the colour of weak tea; raw flour will taste pasty in so short a sauce.
- SaffronA pinch is usually reckoned at roughly 10-15 threads. Crumble them into the warm stock for a few minutes before adding so the colour and aroma release; dropped in whole at the end they do very little.
- Spice quantitiesThe original leaves cinnamon and cloves unmeasured, which is genuinely ambiguous. Start at a scant 1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon and 2-3 whole cloves (or a pinch of ground), taste after the wine has reduced, and add more only if the sauce reads flat.
- Wine to stock ratioOne cup of wine to half a cup of stock is sharp by modern taste. Let the wine boil three to five minutes before the meat goes in so the raw alcohol cooks off; a dry white with some body works better than anything sweet.
- Capers"A few" is vague; a tablespoon or so is a reasonable reading. Rinse brined capers, or they will fight the salt you add later -- season at the end, once the sauce has reduced.
- YieldServes 3 to 4 with rice, boiled potatoes or bread to take up the sauce.
Books of this kind — a dish a day, each tagged with a country — appeared in American home cooking around the turn of the twentieth century, when "cosmopolitan" menus were in fashion. What marks this one as broadly Iberian rather than French is the combination of olive oil instead of butter, garlic, saffron and warm baking spices in a savoury sauce: cinnamon and cloves in meat dishes are often said to be a survival of the medieval spice trade that persisted longer in Portuguese and Spanish cooking than in northern Europe. The recipe is also a leftovers dish. Cold roast veal was a routine problem in a household that bought large joints, and a strongly seasoned pan sauce was one answer — the same logic that produced hash, croquettes and curried mutton.