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Breast of Veal Roasted
Six pounds of veal cut from the breast. Wipe, and skewer meat into shape, sprinkle with salt, pepper, dredge with flour and cover top with thin slices of fat salt pork. Lay in a dripping pan and strew cubes of pork around meat. Place in a very hot oven for the first half hour, basting every ten minutes with fat in pan, then reduce heat and cook meat slowly until tender, allowing twenty minutes to pound; continue basting. The last half hour of cooking remove salt pork, dredge meat again with flour, and brown richly. Remove meat to hot serving platter, surround with Spanish Rice and prepare a Brown Sauce from some of the fat in pan. (See Page 82 for Brown Sauce.)
A plain barded roast of a cut most butchers now sell for braising. The whole thing turns on the two-stage oven and on judging doneness by feel rather than by the clock.
- Oven temperatures"A very hot oven" in books of this period is usually reckoned at around 450-475F, here for the first half hour, to set the crust and start the pork fat running. "Reduce heat and cook slowly" would fall somewhere around 300-325F for the remainder; the book itself gives no figure.
- TimingTwenty minutes to the pound puts a six-pound breast at about two hours, though the recipe does not make clear whether the first half hour counts toward that allowance. Breast is a collagen-heavy cut, so it is tender well past the 145F the USDA gives for whole cuts of veal; expect to take it nearer 175-185F internally before it gives way, and add time rather than pulling it early.
- Buying the cutVeal breast is rarely on display now and usually needs ordering. Ask for it bone-in with the rib tips left on; a six-pound bone-in breast feeds roughly four to six, since a good deal of that weight is bone and cartilage.
- Skewering into shapeThe breast is a flat, floppy triangle. Fold and skewer or tie it into a compact roll so it cooks evenly; butcher's twine at one-inch intervals does the job better than skewers.
- Fat salt porkThis is cured but unsmoked pork fat, usually fatback or fatty belly. Rinse it and pat dry before laying it on, or the roast will be aggressively salty. Thin-sliced unsmoked pancetta or plain fatback substitutes; bacon brings smoke the dish does not want.
- The double dredgeFlour before roasting and again for the final half hour is what gives the deep crust. The second dredging only works if the surface is wet with fat, so baste, then dust, then return it to the oven uncovered.
- Basting and the panA shallow "dripping pan" is the point: a deep roasting pan traps steam and the flour crust will not brown. Every ten minutes for the first half hour is not fussiness, it is how the flour sets.
- RestingThe original says nothing about it. Give the roast 15 to 20 minutes loosely tented before carving; the breast carves cleanly between the ribs once it has settled.
Breast of veal is the frugal end of a costly animal, and its appearance in a Sunday-dinner book is telling: the menu wanted the prestige of veal at a price a middle-class household would pay. Because the cut is lean, thin and short on marbling, cooks barded it, laying sheets of fat salt pork over the top so the meat effectively self-basted, a technique older than the cookbook by centuries and one that is often said to have faded as fattier factory-raised meat and covered roasting pans became standard. The pairing with Spanish rice, a tomato-and-pepper pilaf that was fashionable in American cookbooks of the early twentieth century, marks the book as squarely of its moment: a European cut of meat served with a side dish borrowed, loosely, from the Southwest.