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Veal, Breast of, with Spring Vegetables
Bone, roll, and braise the veal according to the directions already given for VEAL, BREAST OF, ROLLED AND BRAISED. Whilst it is in the stewpan prepare and cook separately young vegetables, such as young turnips, carrots, onions, new potatoes, beans, and green peas. When wanted, heat these in a little veal gravy, and place them fancifully round the veal. Pour a little of the sauce into the dish, and send the rest to table in a tureen.
A serving formula rather than a full method: the actual cooking is delegated to the earlier rolled-and-braised entry, and this page tells you how to dress it. Two things carry the dish — a properly boned and tied breast, and vegetables cooked apart so each keeps its own texture.
- The hinge: cook the vegetables separatelyThe whole point of the recipe is that nothing goes into the braising pan. Turnips, carrots, onions, potatoes, beans and peas all have different cooking times, and boiling them together in veal stock gives you uniform mush. Cook each to just tender, refresh, then warm through in a ladle of the strained braising liquor at the last moment.
- Breast of veal todayA bone-in breast usually runs somewhere in the region of 4-6 lb and is rarely on display; order it from a butcher. Boning takes off perhaps a quarter to a third of the weight, so a 5 lb breast might yield around 3 lb of rolled meat, enough for about six. It is a fatty, sinewy cut that only becomes good with long moist heat.
- Boning and rollingSlide a thin knife along the rib bones and lift them out in one sheet, keeping the meat intact. Season the inside, roll along the grain and tie at 1-inch intervals with butcher's twine; without the ties it will unroll in the pan and slice badly.
- Braising temperature and timeBrown the roll, then braise barely covered with stock, lid on, until a skewer meets no resistance. The book names no temperature — the stewpan is a stovetop vessel — but in a modern oven something around 325F for 2.5 to 3 hours will get you there. Veal breast is done when it is soft, not when it reaches a particular internal reading.
- "Stewpan" and "a little veal gravy"The Victorian stewpan is a lidded pan for slow stovetop cooking, in practice much like a Dutch oven. "Veal gravy" in books of this period may mean a separately made veal stock as readily as the strained braising liquid itself; either way, skim the fat before reducing or the sauce will be greasy.
- Resting before slicingLet the roll sit 20 minutes off the heat, still tied, before cutting. Slice it hot from the pan and the layers slump apart. Remove the twine as you carve, not before.
- "Fancifully round the veal"The word means no more than decoratively; the usual reading is that the vegetables go round the joint in separate groups rather than scattered — bunches of beans, a fan of carrots, potatoes at the corners. Season and butter each one on its own before it goes to the dish.
Cassell's is built as a cross-referenced dictionary, which is why this entry is barely a recipe at all: it assumes you will turn back to Veal, Breast of, Rolled and Braised for the method and treats the spring vegetable garnish as a variation worth its own alphabetical slot. The dish belongs to the French-influenced service that dominated later nineteenth-century English cookery books, where a braised joint arrived ringed with separately cooked garnishes and the sauce came round in a tureen — essentially the printanier or jardinière garnish of the professional kitchen, adapted for a household cook. Breast of veal appears often in these books because it was among the cheaper cuts, unsuited to roasting but rewarding under a lid, and boning and rolling turned an awkward slab of ribs into something carveable. The insistence on young turnips, carrots and onions and new potatoes is a reminder that the book was written for a seasonal larder, when such a plateful was genuinely a spring event rather than a year-round option.