Season 3 pounds of veal. Lay some sliced bacon in a saucepan; let get hot; add the veal. Cover and let brown with 2 sliced onions, 2 carrots and an herb bouquet, 1 bay-leaf and 1 tablespoonful of butter. Add 1 pint of water and let simmer until tender. Add chopped mushrooms and a small glass of wine. Let all get hot and serve.
A plain braise with a light final flourish of mushrooms and wine. The original assumes you know the cut, the time and the amount of wine, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- The cutThree pounds of veal here means stewing veal — boneless shoulder or breast, cut into large chunks. Loin or cutlet will dry out over a long simmer and is wasted money in a braise.
- "Season"The opening word is the whole seasoning instruction: salt and pepper the meat before it goes in the pan. Salting some time ahead is often said to help the surface dry and the interior season more evenly, though opinions differ.
- Herb bouquetA bouquet garni: parsley stems, thyme and the bay-leaf tied with string or bundled in a leek leaf so it can be lifted out before serving.
- Bacon as the fatPeriod bacon was fattier and saltier than most supermarket bacon. Use a few slices of streaky bacon or salt pork, render it slowly, and hold back on added salt until the end.
- Simmering timeNo time is given. Shoulder veal in a pint of water, barely bubbling and covered, needs about 1½ to 2 hours before it yields to a fork. Check the liquid level partway and top up if the pan runs dry.
- A small glass of winePeriod cookbooks generally reckon a wineglassful at about 1/4 cup (2 fl oz), so a "small glass" is likely somewhere in that range. A dry white is the usual choice with veal; add it with the mushrooms and let it cook a few minutes to take off the raw edge.
- MushroomsChopped mushrooms thrown in at the end release water and can thin the sauce. Sautéing them separately in butter until browned, then stirring them through, gives more flavour and keeps the gravy from turning grey and watery.
- The sauceA pint of water and no thickener leaves a thin broth. Either reduce the liquid hard after the meat is lifted out, or finish it with a little kneaded butter and flour — both are standard practice for this style of stew.
- YieldThree pounds of stewing veal serves about six, with boiled potatoes, noodles or rice to catch the liquid.
Veal features more prominently in Swedish home cooking than in British or American, and dishes along these lines -- kalvstuvning, veal stewed with root vegetables and finished with cream or wine -- are found in Nordic household cookery. What is characteristic here is the restraint: onion, carrot, bay, a bouquet, and no paprika, tomato or heavy spice. Books of this type, a dish a day tagged with a nationality, were popular in the early twentieth century and their labels should be read loosely; the browning in bacon fat and the splash of wine belong as much to French bourgeois technique as to Stockholm. The nationality often functioned as a selling point rather than a claim of provenance.