Home › The Principles of Cookery › Veal, Breast of, Roasted
Veal, Breast of, Roasted
If the sweetbread is retained, skewer it to the back. Cover the joint with the caul, or, wanting this, with a piece of buttered paper. Put the veal down at a moderate distance from a clear fire, and baste liberally till done enough. When it has been down about an hour and a half, remove the caul, flour the joint, and let it brown. Serve on a hot dish with melted butter poured over. Garnish with a cut lemon, and send boiled bacon to table with it. If liked, forcemeat balls may be served with the veal, and mushroom sauce sent to table with it. Time to roast the breast, two to two and a half hours, or twenty minutes to the pound. Probable cost, veal, 9d. or 10d. per pound.
A spit-roasting instruction rewritten for a rack and an oven. The joint is fatty, bony and slow-cooking, and most of the recipe's odd steps are about keeping it moist in front of an open fire.
- Caul, and what to use insteadCaul is the lacy fat membrane from around the abdominal organs of a pig, sheep or calf; it melts away and self-bastes the meat. Some butchers can order it, often frozen. The recipe already gives the standard substitute — buttered paper — and a loose foil tent does the same job.
- "A moderate distance from a clear fire"This is open-hearth roasting, with the dripping caught beneath. The original gives no oven temperature; a moderate oven, with the heat raised once the caul comes off and the joint is floured, is the nearest equivalent. Note that the recipe removes the caul at an hour and a half of a two to two-and-a-half hour roast, so the browning stage is a good deal longer than a few minutes.
- The sweetbreadBreast of veal was sold with the thymus attached. Sweetbreads today are bought separately and are usually soaked, blanched and pressed before cooking rather than skewered raw to a roasting joint.
- Timing and temperatureTwenty minutes to the pound is broadly consistent with the two to two and a half hours the recipe gives, for a bone-in breast of roughly 5-6 lb, but judge by a thermometer: 145F for slices that hold together. Breast is rich in connective tissue, which needs considerably more heat and time than that to soften.
- "Melted butter"In Victorian books this almost never means plain melted butter. It is the standard flour-and-butter-and-water sauce — essentially a thin white sauce — made in a saucepan and poured over.
- Boiled bacon on the sideA whole boiling joint of bacon was a household staple then. A thick-cut gammon steak or a few slices of good back bacon serves the same purpose: salt and fat against very lean, mild veal.
- Flouring to brownDusting the surface with flour and returning it to the fire gives a crisp, slightly crusted exterior. It works in an oven too, but the flour must be very light or it goes pasty; pat it on through a sieve.
- YieldNo serving number is given. A breast of veal of 5-6 lb, bone in, feeds six with the bacon and forcemeat balls.
Breast of veal is the cheap end of an expensive animal — the belly, thick with bone and gristle. This is a large, showy roast for a household that could not stretch to a better cut, and the whole apparatus of caul, basting, forcemeat balls, boiled bacon and mushroom sauce is there to give a lean, bland joint some richness and interest. The English preference for very well-done, pale veal, and for serving it with bacon or ham, was long-established and persisted well into the twentieth century; today the same cut is more often stuffed and braised or slow-roasted, which suits its connective tissue better than a fast fire ever did.