Home › The Principles of Cookery › VEAL, FILLET OF, ROASTED (another way)
VEAL, FILLET OF, ROASTED (another way)
The fillet of veal is most commonly roasted, being previously stuffed either in the flap or in the space in the centre, from which the bone was taken. Veal, being a dry meat, requires constant basting either with butter, beef dripping, or suet. It must be roasted thoroughly (underdone veal being neither wholesome nor agreeable), and of a nice brown. When dished, half a pint of melted butter, sometimes mixed with a brown gravy, is poured over it. Curry sauce in a tureen may also be served with it. Bacon, or fried pork-sausage balls, with greens, are among the accompaniments of roasted veal.
A method rather than a formula: Cassell's assumes you know how to work an open fire or a coal range, and that your butcher has boned the leg for you. The points below fill in the numbers the original leaves out.
- What the cut isThe English "fillet of veal" is the boned upper leg — the round, not the loin fillet an American butcher would hand you. Ask for a boned, tied leg roast, usually 4-8 lb; a rolled shoulder behaves similarly, though it is fattier and more forgiving.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn Victorian British cookery books melted butter means a flour-thickened butter sauce, roughly an ounce each of butter and flour to half a pint of water or light stock, not simply butter run in a pan. Half a pint is 10 fl oz in imperial measure, about 1¼ cups.
- Oven and timingRoast at 325-350F after an initial 20 minutes at 425F for colour. Reckon 20-25 minutes per pound for a stuffed leg, and go by a thermometer rather than the clock.
- On "roasted thoroughly"The Victorian horror of underdone veal reflects both taste and the real hazards of unrefrigerated meat. Current guidance puts whole cuts of veal at 145F with a three-minute rest; cooked to the fully well-done stage the book asks for, a lean leg turns dry and grainy.
- Stuffing the cavityIf you stuff the bone pocket, the stuffing must reach 165F, which in practice means overcooking the meat around it. Roasting the forcemeat separately in a dish, or spreading it thinly under the flap, avoids the conflict.
- Basting and bardingConstant basting is the book's answer to a very lean cut. A sheet of pork back fat or streaky bacon tied over the top does the same work with less oven-door opening, and can be removed for the last half hour to brown the surface.
- YieldA boned leg of this kind gives roughly two to three servings per pound of raw weight, so a 5 lb roast feeds ten to fifteen with the sausage balls and greens the entry suggests.
Fillet of veal was a set piece of the nineteenth-century English dinner table \, that carved into neat slices and stretched a long way. The accompaniments listed sketch the period: bacon and forcemeat balls to supply the fat and savour a lean calf's leg lacks, and a tureen of curry sauce, an Anglo-Indian habit well established in British cooking by the time Cassell's was compiled and served with plain roast meats more often than modern readers expect. The insistence that veal be cooked through was common advice in English kitchen manuals of the century, framed as a matter of wholesomeness as much as flavour, and it outlived the conditions of meat storage that first justified it.