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Veal, Breast of, Stewed with Oysters
Take a piece of the breast of veal weighing about two pounds. Put it into a saucepan with a large onion stuck with a clove, half a blade of mace, a bunch of sweet herbs, half an inch of stick cinnamon, and a little pepper and salt. Pour over it the liquor from a dozen oysters, and add a table-spoonful of strained lemon-juice, with a little stock if required. Simmer the veal as gently as possible for two hours, and skim it well. Strain the liquor, put with it a quarter of a pint of milk or cream mixed with the yolks of two eggs, and stir the sauce till it thickens. Make the oysters hot by putting them into the oven in the dish in which the veal is to be served, but do not let them get cooked. Pour the sauce upon them, place the veal in the centre of the dish, and serve very hot. Time to simmer the veal, two hours. Probable cost, if made with milk, 2s. 10d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian white stew: the veal poaches in oyster liquor and aromatics, the strained broth becomes a yolk-thickened sauce, and the oysters are only warmed through. Two steps decide whether it succeeds.
- The hinge: the egg sauce must not boilOnce the yolks and milk go in, keep the pan below a simmer and stir constantly, or the yolks scramble and the sauce breaks. Around 175-180F it will coat a spoon; take it off the heat there.
- The oysters"Make the oysters hot... but do not let them get cooked" is deliberate: oysters given more than a minute or two of real heat shrink and turn rubbery. The book gives no oven setting; in practice this means the gentlest residual warmth, well below simmering heat, for a few minutes only. Note that oysters warmed rather than cooked carry the usual raw-shellfish risk; anyone pregnant, elderly or immunocompromised should give them a proper cooking or skip the dish.
- Breast of vealA bony, collagen-rich cut sold boned and rolled or as a bone-in slab; ask a butcher, as supermarkets rarely stock it. Two hours of the gentlest simmer is right for it — it needs the time to go tender, and hard boiling will only make it stringy.
- MeasuresA quarter of a pint in an imperial book is 5 fl oz, a generous half cup. The liquor from a dozen oysters is roughly half a cup; if the oysters are dry-packed you will need more stock to keep the veal covered.
- Blade of maceThe lacy outer covering of nutmeg, sold whole in blades or ground. Half a blade is about an eighth of a teaspoon ground — add it near the end if using ground, as it fades.
- Bunch of sweet herbsPeriod shorthand for a bouquet garni: parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied together. Tie it so it can be lifted out before straining.
- SkimmingVeal throws a great deal of grey scum in the first twenty minutes. Skim it off diligently — the sauce is meant to be pale and clean, and anything left in will cloud it.
- ServingThe book says four or five; two pounds of bone-in breast is closer to three or four modern portions. Rice, plain boiled potatoes or toast points take the sauce well.
- The cost line"2s. 10d." is two shillings and tenpence in pre-decimal money, a household budgeting note rather than an instruction.
Veal and oysters were a standard Victorian pairing, and one that says a good deal about the period's larder: oysters were cheap enough through much of the nineteenth century in Britain — before prices rose sharply as the beds were depleted in the later decades — to be used as a seasoning liquid rather than a luxury garnish, and their briny liquor served much as a stock cube or anchovy essence does now, lending savour to bland white meat. The dish belongs to the family of "white" stews and fricassees inherited from French cookery, where the point is a pale, delicate sauce bound with egg yolks and cream rather than browned with flour. Breast of veal was the economical cut, gelatinous and forgiving, and Cassell's — a large household dictionary — includes it alongside grander veal dishes precisely because it stretched an inexpensive joint into something that looked and tasted expensive. The stick cinnamon and mace are a lingering trace of an older English taste for warm spice in meat cookery, a taste often said to have been retreating by the end of the century.