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Braised Fillet of Veal
3 1/2 pounds veal, 1/4 pound larding bacon, 1 onion, 1 carrot, 1 turnip, 1/2 lemon, forcemeat, stock and a little celery.
Remove bone, fill in cavity with forcemeat. Cut some even strips of bacon 1/4 of an inch thick, and with a larding needle thread neatly on top of meat. Slice vegetables, place them in a pan, set veal on these, sprinkle with a little lemon juice. Cover with Criscoed paper, and add stock to come three-parts up the meat. Cover closely and set pan in oven (in order to get top heat also) or over a gentle fire, and simmer 2 1/2 to 3 hours. Remove veal to a dripping tin with very little stock, and brown in front of fire or in hot oven. Reduce stock in pan, meanwhile, by fast boiling without lid, and strain round meat. Garnish with cut lemon, and, if liked, with curled bacon and forcemeat balls.
The forcemeat is made as follows: A 1/4 cup Crisco, 4 tablespoons chopped cooked ham, 1 cup breadcrumbs, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, 1 teaspoon mixed herbs, thyme, and marjoram. Add salt and pepper to taste, and mix with 2 well-beaten eggs.
A braise from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks, written when veal loin or leg was still boned and stuffed at home. Most of the work is in the preparation; the cooking itself is slow and forgiving.
- The hinge: keep it at a bare simmerStock three-parts up the meat and a tight lid, cooked so the liquid never comes to a boil. Veal that is pushed to a rolling boil in the pan turns dry and stringy long before it turns tender.
- Criscoed paperA round of paper greased with Crisco, laid directly on the meat as a cartouche. Buttered or oiled parchment does the same job, under the pan lid.
- "Set pan in oven ... to get top heat also"The instruction distinguishes the oven from a stovetop burner, which heats only from below. The book gives no temperature; a low oven, in the region of 325F, will hold the 2 1/2 to 3 hours specified at a simmer.
- Browning "in front of fire"An open fire at the range front, used as we would use a broiler. The recipe offers a hot oven as its own alternative: transfer the drained veal to a shallow tin and give it a short spell in a hot oven, or a few minutes under the broiler, until the bacon strips crisp and the surface colors.
- DonenessA boned, stuffed 3 1/2 lb roast should reach 165F in the center of the forcemeat, the figure for stuffing cooked inside meat, since the stuffing contains raw egg and cooked ham. The braising time given will normally overshoot that comfortably; check with a thermometer rather than the clock.
- Larding, and the alternativeLarding bacon is unsmoked fatback cut into lardons and drawn through the meat with a larding needle. If you have no needle, lay strips of thick unsmoked bacon or fatback over the top and tie them on with butcher's twine; the fat still bastes the lean veal as it renders.
- Forcemeat proportionsA quarter cup of fat, 1 cup crumbs and 2 eggs makes a fairly loose stuffing, right for filling a bone cavity but slack for rolling into balls. If you want the optional forcemeat balls, hold back some of the egg or add crumbs until the mixture holds a shape, and simmer or bake them separately.
- The sauceReducing the strained braising liquid by fast boiling is the whole sauce; no thickening is called for. Skim the fat before reducing, or it will be greasy, and taste before salting since ham and bacon have already seasoned it.
- YieldNot stated. A 3 1/2 lb boned roast with stuffing serves six to eight.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook that flourished in the 1910s: the branded recipe collection, published to persuade cooks that a new hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter, lard and suet anywhere they appeared. Hence Crisco in the forcemeat and on the covering paper, in a dish that a British or American cookbook of a generation earlier would have made with butter and a paper rubbed with dripping. The technique itself is much older and thoroughly French in outline -- a boned joint larded with strips of pork fat, set on a bed of sliced aromatics, moistened part-way with stock, sealed, cooked slowly, then glazed at the last minute in fierce dry heat. Veal was treated this way because it is lean and mild: the larding supplies fat from within, the bacon and ham supply the savor, and the lemon cuts the richness. The direction to brown the finished joint "in front of fire" is tempting to read as a piece of dating, though it proves little: the phrase persisted as boilerplate in cookbooks long after ranges were common, and this recipe offers the oven as an equal alternative in the same sentence.