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VEAL, BREAST OF, STUFFED AND STEWED (another way)
Stuff the breast of veal as before. Line a stewpan with slices of bacon, put in the veal, and add two onions, each stuck with one clove, a carrot, a bunch of sweet herbs, and a little pepper. Lay slices of bacon on the top of the veal, and pour upon it about half a pint or more of stock made from bones. Cover the saucepan closely, and let its contents simmer gently until done enough. Take up the veal, strain the gravy, skim it well, thicken with a little brown thickening, stir the juice of half a lemon into it, and pour it over the meat. A glassful of light wine may be added or not. Garnish the dish with slices of lemon, forcemeat balls, and fried bacon, or send bacon to table on a separate dish. Time to stew the veal, three hours. Probable cost, 9d. to 10d. per pound. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A classic braise: the veal breast is cooked between layers of bacon in very little liquid, so the pan does most of the work. Two things need attention before you start — the stuffing, which the recipe assumes you already have, and the seal on the lid.
- "Stuff as before""Stuff as before" cross-refers to the preceding recipe in the entry. Veal forcemeats of this period are typically breadcrumbs, chopped suet or bacon fat, parsley, lemon zest, mace or nutmeg, salt and pepper, bound with egg. Any bread-and-herb forcemeat will do; sew or tie the pocket closed so the stuffing does not escape during three hours of simmering.
- The cutBreast of veal is rarely in supermarket cases and must generally be ordered. Ask for it boned, with the pocket cut, weighing 4-5 lb. A boned, rolled veal shoulder behaves similarly if breast is unavailable.
- Half a pint of stockAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. That is deliberately little — the meat braises in steam rather than boiling in liquid, which is why the tight lid matters. Add more only if the pan threatens to run dry.
- Sealing the pan"Cover closely" asks for as tight a seal as the pan allows; cooks of the period sometimes weighted a lid or luted it with a flour-and-water paste. A sheet of parchment pressed down over the meat under a heavy lid gets you there; otherwise the liquid can boil away before three hours.
- Heat and timeThree hours is right for a stuffed breast, but only at a bare simmer — the surface should barely tremble. A hard boil in this small amount of liquid will shred the meat and toughen the forcemeat. An oven at 300-325F, lid on, is the easiest way to hold that temperature steadily.
- Brown thickeningA Victorian standby: flour cooked in butter or dripping until nut-brown, kept in a jar for exactly this purpose. Make a small brown roux — about 1 tablespoon each butter and flour — and whisk it into the strained, skimmed gravy off the boil.
- Bacon and sweet herbsUse unsmoked streaky bacon or pancetta; modern smoked bacon will dominate the veal. "A bunch of sweet herbs" covers a range of English kitchen herbs -- parsley, thyme, marjoram, a bay leaf -- tied in a bunch, much as in a bouquet garni.
- The wineA "glassful" in books of this period usually means a wineglassful, roughly 2 fl oz; "light wine" would be a dry white or a light red. The recipe adds it to the strained, thickened gravy at the end, so it gets little cooking.
- YieldSix to eight, as stated, provided the breast is a full 4-5 lb. Rest the meat 15 minutes before carving, cutting so that each slice takes in the stuffing.
Breast of veal was cheap meat, and this recipe knows it: the "probable cost, 9d. to 10d. per pound" places it well below the prime cuts Cassell's prices elsewhere, and the whole method — a bony, gelatinous, awkward cut boned out, stuffed with bread and suet to stretch it, then braised for hours between rashers of bacon — is a nineteenth-century thrift technique dressed for the dining room. The finishing gestures (lemon juice stirred into a browned gravy, forcemeat balls and lemon slices as garnish) belong to a tradition of high-flavoured, acid-sharpened sauces for veal that runs back through eighteenth-century English cookery. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a later reissue and revision of a Dictionary of Cookery belonging to the later nineteenth century, characteristically gives several methods for the same cut in sequence — hence "another way" and the breezy instruction to stuff the breast "as before", which assumes a reader working through the entry rather than dipping into it.