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Veal Pot Pie
Wipe piece of veal from shoulder; and cut into pieces for serving; add 1/2 inch strip salt pork or bacon for each piece of veal, cover with cold water, put over fire and bring quickly to boiling point, then, after boiling five minutes, skim and let simmer until meat is tender. When nearly tender, add salt and pepper to taste, and biscuit mixture cut into rounds. Cook ten minutes without lifting cover. Serve meat in center of platter, dumplings at ends and sauce, thickened, if needed, with flour and water, over whole. Dumplings may be steamed 15 minutes over saucepan boiling water. This is usually preferable, to avoid removing them from fire until instant of serving. Beaten yolks of 2 eggs, diluted with 1/2 cup cream and added to sauce, gives a richer dish.
Biscuit mixture is made as follows: Sift 1 quart good flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder and 1 teaspoon salt, putting it through sifter 2 or 3 times. Rub into flour 1 large tablespoon Crisco and add sufficient sweet milk to make dough as soft as can be rolled and cut. Roll about 3/4 inch thick, cut with round biscuit cutter.
A stewed veal dish with biscuit dumplings, from the era when Crisco was still a novelty worth naming. The whole thing hinges on the lid.
- Do not lift the coverThe dumplings cook in trapped steam; a peek collapses them and they turn dense and gummy. Ten minutes covered, or the steamer-basket method the recipe prefers, which lets you hold them off the heat until serving.
- Baking powder proportionTwo teaspoons to a quart of flour (about 4 cups) is low by modern standards; a current biscuit recipe would typically use two or three times that for the same amount of flour. If your dumplings come out heavy, that is why.
- CriscoNewly on the market when this book was written and named as a selling point. One large tablespoon of any solid shortening, lard or butter works the same; rub it in until the flour looks like coarse meal.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, as distinct from the soured or buttermilk that older recipes often called for. Expect roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups for a quart of flour, added until the dough is just barely rollable.
- The vealShoulder is right for this: collagen-rich, and it needs the long simmer. Figure roughly an hour to an hour and a half at a bare simmer, going by the recipe's own test of tenderness. Veal shoulder is a special-order item at many counters; boneless pork shoulder or beef chuck behaves similarly if you cannot get it.
- Salt pork stripsA half-inch strip per piece of meat is there for fat and salt, since veal has almost none of its own. Blanch very salty pork a minute or two first, and hold back on the seasoning salt until the end as the recipe instructs.
- The egg-and-cream enrichmentThis is a liaison, not a thickener you can boil. Temper the beaten yolks and cream with a ladle of hot broth, stir back off the heat, and keep the sauce below about 180F or it will curdle into scrambled threads.
- YieldA quart of flour makes a great many dumplings, enough for eight or more; the biscuit mixture halves cleanly if you are cooking for four.
Pot pie in nineteenth-century American usage often meant exactly this: meat stewed in a pot with a raised biscuit or paste crust dropped on top, not a baked pastry-lidded dish. Veal was a common butcher's offering in the era of small dairies, where surplus bull calves were slaughtered young, and the shoulder was among the cheaper cuts. The naming of Crisco dates the recipe closely; the shortening was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and cookbooks of the following decade routinely specified it by brand. The optional yolk-and-cream finish is a straight French liaison, the kind of touch American cookbook writers of the period used to lift a plain family stew into something fit for company.