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Breast of Veal
Place it on the dish with the breast-bone or brisket nearest you. Cut off the gristly brisket, then separate it into sections. Cut the upper part parallel with the ribs, or between each rib if very small. Slice the sweetbread, and serve a portion of brisket, rib, and sweetbread to each person.
Four sentences, and three of them are about the order of the cuts. The page assumes you know the anatomy and need only be told what to take off first.
- Orientation comes before anything elsePlace it on the dish with the breast-bone or brisket nearest you. Every entry in this book begins by turning the joint to face the carver a particular way, because the carver was standing at the table with the dish in front of the company and had one chance to get it right. Half of carving is deciding which way round the meat goes.
- Bone-in breast of veal must be orderedA butcher today will sell a breast of veal boned, ready to roll and stuff, because that is what the modern recipes want. Boning it removes the rib structure on which this entire instruction depends. If you intend to carve it this way, ask for it whole and bone-in and give notice.
- Take the gristly brisket off firstThe cartilage-tipped ends of the ribs stay chewy however long the joint cooks, and the page’s first cut removes them as a piece before any portions are considered. It is still the right move. The trimmed section is then divided and served as its own thing, and it is the part worth gnawing.
- The portion is a set of textures, not a sliceServe a portion of brisket, rib, and sweetbread to each person. Carving here means distributing three different textures fairly across the table rather than cutting even slices. That idea — that the carver’s job is equity between the parts of an animal — is the one a modern cook has most completely lost.
- There is a sweetbread on the dishSlice the sweetbread, says the page, without explaining where it came from, so it was cooked with or alongside the joint and sent up on the same platter. No current recipe for breast of veal mentions one, and a butcher will not supply it unasked. It must be bought separately and cooked on purpose.
- Veal itself has changedWhat is sold now in Britain is rose veal from dairy herds, darker and older than the meat this book assumed, and the ethics of the trade are a live question rather than a settled one. It behaves differently in the oven: more flavour, less of the pale blandness the period was after.
The brevity is the point. A page this short can only be written for a reader who already knows roughly how a calf is put together and wants only the sequence of cuts, which tells you that carving was an expected accomplishment rather than a specialism. It was performed in front of the guests, standing, with everyone waiting, and a book like this existed because getting it wrong was a small public humiliation. The joint itself is a cheap one, a breast rather than a loin, and it is treated here as perfectly ordinary company food, which it was.