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Veal, Loin of, Boiled
It is not often that the loin of veal is boiled whole, as it is always best to finish it the day on which it is cooked, because cold boiled veal is not a particularly relishing dish. Nevertheless, to invalids and persons of delicate taste boiled veal is sometimes more acceptable than roast veal. The best end of the loin, with the kidney left in, is excellent, and should be served with oyster or well-made white sauce. The chump end may be accompanied by parsley and butter. A loin of veal should be boiled just like a fillet of veal, though on account of its being less solid it will not need to be boiled quite so long. A piece weighing from eight to ten pounds will need to simmer from two hours and a quarter to two hours and a half.
An unusual treatment of a cut most cooks now roast. The method is sound, but the timing belongs to an era when veal was expected to be cooked through to falling softness.
- Simmer, never boilThe instruction that matters most is buried in the last line: simmer. Held at a true boil the muscle fibres seize and the lean loin turns to string. Keep the water at 180-185F, barely trembling, with the joint fully covered.
- The cutA loin of veal with the kidney attached is generally a special order from a butcher; veal is more often sold as chops, cutlets or boned loin. The "best end" is the end adjoining the ribs, the "chump end" the rump end nearest the leg.
- TimingTwo and a quarter to two and a half hours for 8-10 lb reflects Victorian doneness. Modern practice cooks veal to an internal 145-150F and rests it, which on a joint of this size will take appreciably less time than the recipe allows. Use a thermometer at the thickest point away from bone rather than the clock.
- The kidneyVeal kidney left in the loin cooks far faster than the surrounding meat and will be well past its best by the time the joint is done. If you want it pink, have the butcher remove it and cook it separately.
- Flavour the waterThe recipe gives no instruction about the cooking water. Plain water gives pale, dull meat; an onion, a carrot, a bay leaf, a few peppercorns and salt help, and the resulting liquor is worth keeping as the base for the white sauce.
- Oyster sauceThe period sauce is a white sauce finished with poached oysters and their liquor. Add the oysters off the heat and give them a minute at most; a quarter of an hour of simmering, as older books sometimes direct, makes them rubbery.
- Parsley and butterNot a compound butter but the Victorian parsley sauce: a butter-and-flour sauce with a large quantity of chopped blanched parsley stirred in at the end.
- YieldAn 8-10 lb bone-in loin serves twelve to sixteen. The author's warning about cold boiled veal is fair; if you are fewer, buy a boned and rolled section of loin of 3-4 lb and reduce the time accordingly.
Boiled white meats occupy a particular place in nineteenth-century English cookery, where paleness was a virtue rather than a fault: veal, chicken and rabbit were poached to keep them light in colour and were then dressed in an equally pale sauce. The mention of invalids is not incidental. Cassell's, like Mrs Beeton and, it is often said, household dictionaries of the period generally, treated the sickroom as a branch of the kitchen, and boiled veal with a plain white sauce was standard convalescent fare, thought to be more digestible than roast meat and less "heating" than beef or mutton. The pairing of veal with oysters, which reads as extravagance now, was ordinary then: oysters were cheap and abundant in Britain until overfishing and disease thinned the beds in the later Victorian decades, and they served as a sauce ingredient and a stuffing rather than a luxury in their own right.