Home › The Principles of Cookery › Veal, Breast of, Stuffed and Roasted
Veal, Breast of, Stuffed and Roasted
Take a breast of veal weighing about eight pounds. Raise the thick part with the fingers, and force into the vacant place as much veal stuffing as possible. Bring the edges of the meat together, and sew them with twine, or fasten them with skewers, that the forcemeat may not escape. Put the veal down at a moderate distance from a clear fire. Baste it liberally. When done enough, take it up, pour melted butter over, and send fried rashers of bacon to table with it. Time to roast the veal, one hour and three-quarters. Probable cost, 10d. per pound. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A Victorian spit-roast written for an open fire; the method transfers to an oven with a few adjustments, chiefly to the timing, which is optimistic for a cut this tough.
- The hinge: breast of veal wants slow heatBreast is a fatty, sinewy cut laced with cartilage and rib bone, and one hour three-quarters at roasting heat will leave it chewy. Cover and roast at 300-325F for three hours or more, until a skewer slides through the thick end with no resistance, then uncover briefly to colour the outside.
- "A moderate distance from a clear fire"This is spit-roasting language: a fire burnt through to bright, smokeless coals, the joint set back far enough not to scorch. In an oven a rough equivalent is around 325F with the meat on a rack over a tray, so drippings collect for basting.
- Stuffing temperatureForcemeat packed into a pocket of meat insulates itself and heats slowly. The centre of the stuffing needs to reach 165F, which on a joint this size usually happens well before the meat itself is tender.
- Veal stuffingA typical Victorian veal forcemeat is breadcrumbs, shredded suet, lemon zest, parsley, thyme, nutmeg and egg to bind, sometimes with chopped ham or bacon. Butter substitutes for the suet without harm; roughly 1 lb of stuffing suits an 8 lb breast.
- Raising the pocketAsk the butcher to cut a pocket between the ribs and the outer layer of meat, or work a boning knife in horizontally from the thick end. Butcher's twine and a trussing needle do the sewing; metal skewers work but leak more.
- "Melted butter"In Victorian usage this is not simply butter melted in a pan but the standard drawn-butter sauce, butter thickened with a little flour and water. Plain melted butter is a reasonable substitute if you would rather not make it.
- Cost and yieldAt tenpence a pound this was cheaper than the prime cuts of veal, which is why breast rather than loin. Six or seven servings is plausible for an 8 lb bone-in breast; expect a good deal of that weight to be bone and cartilage.
- Resting and carvingRest the joint 20 minutes before cutting. Carve down between the ribs so each portion takes a slice of stuffing with it, or remove the rib bones entirely after roasting and slice across the whole.
Breast of veal was the household cook's answer to an expensive animal: the calf's cheapest cut, thin and bony, made to feed a table by way of a stuffed pocket. The technique of raising a flap and packing it with forcemeat is much older than Cassell's and is generally traced to the early English cookery books, the forcemeat serving both to stretch the meat and to season a cut that has little flavour of its own. The fried bacon sent to table alongside is doing the same work as the ham in the stuffing, since veal was often said to be a "cold" and insipid meat needing the support of something salted and fatty. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, the later revised successor to the Dictionary of Cookery of the 1870s, compiled for middle-class households running on a budget, prices nearly every dish by the pound, and the tenpence noted here suggests a joint for a family that could not run to a loin.