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Veal, Knuckle of, Stewed with Green Peas
Take a small knuckle of veal. Melt a slice of fresh butter in a frying-pan, and put into it two onions sliced and the knuckle of veal whole. Turn the meat about till it is lightly and equally browned. Put it into a stewpan with the onions and as much boiling stock or water as will cover it. Let the liquor boil, then simmer gently for an hour. Add two lettuces finely shredded, a pint of freshly-shelled green peas, two tea-spoonfuls of salt, and a tea-spoonful of pepper, and simmer all gently together another hour. Serve the meat on a hot dish with the gravy poured over it, and send boiled rice to table on a separate dish. If liked, one or more cucumbers, pared, freed from seeds and sliced, may be stewed in the gravy as well as the peas. Boiled bacon should be sent to table with it. Time to stew the veal, about two hours or more, according to size. Probable cost, four pounds at 5d. per pound, five pounds at 6d. per pound, six pounds at 7d. per pound.
A Victorian braise of a cheap cut, gentle heat and early-summer vegetables. Two things need attention: the cut itself, and the fact that the peas go in an hour before the dish is served.
- The cutA knuckle of veal is the shank — the lower leg, bone in, full of gelatine. Ask a butcher for a whole veal shank, or use two or three thick osso buco slices, which fit a pan better and give the same result. A "small" knuckle in the original costings runs 4–6 lb, so scale down accordingly for a modern household.
- Cook it longer than two hoursTwo hours at a bare simmer will not always render shank tender; count on 2½ to 3 hours, testing that the meat pulls from the bone. Keep the liquid trembling rather than bubbling — a hard boil tightens the muscle fibres and clouds the gravy.
- The peasA pint of shelled peas is roughly 10–12 oz, which means about 2 lb in the pod. An hour of simmering will turn them khaki and floury; the long cooking is what the recipe asks for. If you want them green, add them in the last 15–20 minutes and let only the lettuce take the long cooking.
- Lettuce as a vegetableA crisp cos or romaine is the likeliest reading — it collapses into the gravy and thickens it slightly, in the manner of petits pois à la française. Butterhead works but disappears entirely.
- SeasoningTwo teaspoonfuls of salt and a full teaspoonful of pepper is heavy for the volume of liquid here, particularly if you are using stock rather than water. Start with half of each and correct at the end, once the liquid has reduced.
- CucumberIf you add cucumber, peel it, halve it, scrape out the seeds and cut it into thick batons. Give it 20 minutes at most; longer and it goes to threads.
- The bacon on the side"Boiled bacon" here means a bacon or gammon joint, simmered separately and sliced; a green (unsmoked) cure sits most easily beside the veal. Cook it apart and keep its salty liquor out of the stew.
- Yield and the costingsA shank of this size serves four to six with the rice. The prices are pre-decimal — 5d. to 7d. a pound — and are useful only as a reminder that veal knuckle was among the cheapest meat on the block.
Cassell's treats the knuckle as a thrift cut, and the costings printed at the end make the point: this was the end of the animal you bought when you wanted a large dish for little money, relying on long slow heat to turn collagen into something rich. The combination of peas, shredded lettuce and a little onion simmered in stock recalls the French kitchen — the same logic as petits pois à la française — at a time when shelled peas were a brief and eagerly awaited summer arrival rather than a year-round freezer item. The boiled rice sent to table separately, rather than potatoes, is worth noticing: it absorbs a gravy that was gelatinous but deliberately unthickened, and the accompanying plate of boiled bacon supplied the salt and fat that lean veal lacks.