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Veal Brawn
Boil for three hours a knuckle of veal weighing seven pounds, with an onion, a turnip, and a head of celery. When tender, take out all the bones and cut the meat into small pieces; season well with pepper, salt, and sage, then turn out into a cake-tin, keeping back nearly all the liquor. When cold and firmly set, turn out of the tin, and serve as required. The bones should be put back again, with the remainder of the stock, and simmered slowly for several hours with the vegetables, when an excellent stock will be ready for use.
A pressed jellied meat loaf that relies entirely on the natural gelatine in a veal knuckle. The instruction that matters most is to hold back the liquor: too much and the loaf will not slice.
- Knuckle of vealThis is the shank, sold today as veal osso buco or a whole hind shank, bone in. A 7 lb knuckle is larger than most butchers cut now; two shanks totalling 6-7 lb will do, and you want the bone and its cartilage, since the collagen in them and in the surrounding connective tissue is what sets the dish.
- How much liquor to add"Keeping back nearly all the liquor" means barely moistening the chopped meat, perhaps half a cup of the reduced cooking liquid per 2 lb of meat. If the liquid has not become tacky on the fingers when cool, boil it down further before adding it, or the brawn will not set.
- The cake-tinA plain deep tin rather than a fluted one will turn out most cleanly; a large loaf tin of 2 lb capacity or more is the nearest modern equivalent, sized to the yield. Line it with cling film if you want a clean turn-out, and press the meat down under a weighted plate while it chills.
- Setting timeChill at least 6 hours and preferably overnight in the refrigerator. Get it into the cold within two hours of taking the meat off the heat rather than leaving it out to cool at room temperature, as a Victorian larder would have allowed.
- Three hours boilingKeep it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil. A hard boil emulsifies the fat into the stock and clouds the jelly; you want the meat falling from the bone but the liquid still clear.
- SeasoningSeason the meat more aggressively than seems right while it is warm, since cold jellied meat tastes flat. Around 1 teaspoon of salt per pound of cooked meat is a starting point, adjusted to taste, with plenty of black pepper and about a tablespoon of chopped sage.
- The second stockThe bones are worth returning to the pot as directed. Three to four hours is enough for a second extraction; if you go longer the vegetables will have collapsed entirely and are best strained out. Strain and chill it, then lift off the fat.
- Yield and servingA 7 lb knuckle yields roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb of pressed meat, enough for eight to ten as a cold cut. Serve in thin slices with mustard, pickles or a sharp vinegar dressing, and eat within three days.
Brawn began as a dish of pressed pig's head, the word itself once meaning simply boar's flesh, and by the nineteenth century it covered any cold meat set in its own jelly and turned out of a mould. Veal brawn is the genteel version: paler, milder, and prized because a veal knuckle gives up a good deal of gelatine, so the loaf sets firm without added isinglass or leaf gelatine. It was a thrift exercise as much as a recipe, turning one cheap bony joint into cold slices and then a second pot of stock from the same bones. The instruction to put the bones back is the whole ethic of the book in a sentence.