Cook 3 pounds of veal; when nearly done, add ½ cup of vinegar, ½ cup of raisins, a pinch of cloves and cinnamon and a tablespoonful of horseradish. Thicken the sauce with buttered bread-crumbs; season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve with boiled rice.
August 25 — No. 25
Jewish
The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to stew meat; almost everything except the flavourings has been left out. What follows fills the gaps.
- The missing methodNo pan, liquid or time is given. Cut 3 lb of boneless veal shoulder into 1½-inch pieces, brown them in a little fat, then add stock or water to come halfway up and simmer covered for about 1½ hours until a fork slides in easily. "When nearly done" means at roughly the 70-minute mark, so the vinegar has time to lose its raw edge but not to cook away.
- This is a sweet-and-sour braiseHalf a cup of vinegar to 3 lb of meat is assertive. Cider vinegar or a mild wine vinegar suits it better than distilled white. If the finished sauce tastes sharp, a teaspoon of sugar or honey balances it without turning the dish into a dessert.
- HorseradishA tablespoon of grated fresh horseradish, or of the plain bottled grated kind in vinegar. Not creamed horseradish sauce, which is mostly dairy and sugar and will curdle in the acid.
- Buttered bread-crumbs as thickenerDry crumbs rubbed with softened butter, stirred into the simmering sauce off the heat so they swell and bind. Start with a scant half cup of crumbs to 2 tablespoons butter and add more only if the sauce stays thin; too much and it turns pasty.
- The butter is a kashrut problemButter with veal breaks the separation of meat and milk, so the dish as printed is not kosher despite the title. A cook keeping kashrut would need schmaltz, oil or margarine for the crumbs instead; the substitution is direct and changes nothing else.
- Spicing"A pinch" of cloves goes a long way in a moist braise. The recipe gives only a pinch for both spices; if you want them to register in this quantity of meat, something like ⅛ teaspoon ground cloves with a slightly more generous hand on the cinnamon is a reasonable starting point.
- YieldThree pounds of veal serves six generously with the rice. Season at the very end, after the vinegar has reduced, or the salt will land too heavy.
The vinegar-and-raisin combination marks this as a version of what Ashkenazi households called essig fleisch or sour meat — a sweet-sour braise found across Central and Eastern Europe, and it is tempting, though no more than a surmise, to connect it with the same taste for sharpened, dried-fruit-thickened sauces that produced sauerbraten and the German Rosinensauce. Its appearance in a 365-day round-the-world calendar cookbook says as much about American publishing around the turn of the twentieth century as about Jewish cooking: books of this kind labelled a dish by nationality on the strength of a single characteristic flavour note, then printed it with butter in the sauce. The horseradish is at home in German and Central European cooking as much as in Eastern European, and veal shoulder was the affordable cut for a stew of this size in a period when veal was far more commonly eaten in American cities than it is now.