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Veal Collops, Braised
Cut about a pound of the fillet of veal into neat rounds half an inch thick and about the size of a crown piece. Pick the leaves from a handful of parsley, wash them and chop them small, then mix with them a minced shallot and a small bunch of chives. Butter a stewpan thickly, sprinkle some of the herbs into it, and place in it alternate layers of veal and herbs until all the ingredients are used. Season each layer of veal with salt and pepper, and add a small slice of butter or a tea-spoonful of olive oil occasionally. Cover the whole with slices of bacon, and lay a round of oiled paper on the top. Put the lid on the stewpan, put a few redhot cinders upon it (if this can be done), and stew the veal as gently as possible over a slow fire till it is tender. Arrange the pieces of veal in a dish. Half a glassful of light wine should be poured in when the meat is half dressed. Put a little brown sauce into the stewpan, let it boil, and pour it over the collops.
A layered, low-moisture braise: the veal essentially steams in butter, herbs and its own juices under a blanket of bacon. The whole thing succeeds or fails on how gently it cooks.
- Keep the heat very lowFillet of veal in this period usually means the thick end of the leg, though the term is also used for the loin; either cut is very lean and turns dry and grainy the moment it simmers hard. Set the pan on the lowest burner with a heat diffuser, or braise at 300F in the oven, and check at 40 minutes.
- The size of a crown pieceA crown was a large coin roughly an inch and a half across. Cut the veal into rounds of about that width and half an inch thick — roughly the size of a medallion of pork tenderloin.
- Redhot cinders on the lidThis is top heat from an open range: coals on the lid turned the stewpan into a rudimentary oven so the meat cooked from above as well as below. A covered casserole in a 300F oven does the same job with no cinders required.
- Oiled paperA cartouche. Cut a round of parchment to the diameter of the pan, brush it with oil or butter, and press it directly onto the bacon to hold the small amount of moisture against the meat.
- BaconThe bacon is barding, not flavouring, so unsmoked streaky bacon or pancetta suits it better than heavily smoked supermarket rashers, which will dominate the parsley and chives.
- Half a glassful of light wineA wine glass of the period is generally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so half a glass is roughly 1 fl oz — 2 tablespoons — of a dry white. Add it when the meat is about halfway through.
- Brown sauceEspagnole or a good demi-glace. A well-reduced brown veal or chicken stock, lightly thickened, is the practical modern substitute; you need only a few tablespoons to deglaze and coat.
- YieldA pound of veal gives two generous or three modest portions. Serve with something to catch the sauce — plain rice, boiled potatoes or buttered noodles.
Collop is an old English word for a slice of meat cut for quick cooking, in use long before this dictionary appeared and surviving in Collop Monday, the day before Shrove Tuesday, when bacon collops and eggs were traditionally eaten before the Lenten fast. By the late nineteenth century the term was often associated with veal, though beef collops — Scotch collops — remained current, and the dish demonstrates a technique rather than a regional speciality: braising lean meat in layers with fat and herbs, sealed under paper and barded with bacon, so that nothing escapes. The instruction to heap red-hot cinders on the lid is the giveaway that this recipe predates the reliable closed range — it is a domestic version of what French cooks did with a braisière, a pan with a recessed lid designed to hold coals, and which takes its name from braise, the French word for hot embers.