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VEAL, LOIN OF, STEAMED (a German recipe)
Bone a loin of veal, remove the kidneys, and trim away the superfluous fat. Spread a layer of veal forcemeat over the inner side of the veal, then roll it, and bind with twine to keep it in shape. Dissolve a slice of butter in a saucepan, put in the veal, and turn it about over the fire till it is equally and lightly browned all over. Put with it a sliced carrot, a small onion, two bay-leaves, and a little pepper and salt. Pour a tea-cupful of stock over it, cover the saucepan closely, and let the veal steam gently till tender. Take up the joint, strain and skim the gravy, stir into it a cupful of sour cream and two table-spoonfuls of bruised capers. Let it boil, and pour it over the meat. If liked, the kidneys may be browned and steamed with the loin. Time to steam the veal, an hour and a half to two hours.
This is a braise rather than a steaming in the modern sense: the meat cooks in its own steam under a tight lid with only a cupful of liquid. Two things decide whether it works — keeping the pan at a bare simmer, and keeping the sour cream from splitting at the end.
- The sour creamAdd it off the boil, off direct heat, and warm it through rather than boiling it hard as instructed. Use full-fat sour cream or crème fraîche; low-fat versions curdle almost immediately. Stirring a ladle of the hot gravy into the cream first, then returning the mixture to the pan, keeps it smooth.
- Vessel and heatA heavy lidded casserole or Dutch oven with a well-fitting lid. On the stovetop hold it at the barest tremble; in the oven, 300–325F does the same job with less attention. If steam escapes freely the cupful of stock will boil away.
- "A tea-cupful"Roughly 5 to 6 fl oz — a scant three-quarters of a cup. It looks scant, and it is meant to; the veal releases plenty of its own juice under the lid.
- Boning the loinAsk the butcher to bone and trim it, and to leave the flap intact so it will roll. A boned loin of 3 to 4 lb serves six to eight. Tie at roughly one-inch intervals so the roll holds a even cylinder and cooks at one rate.
- Veal forcemeatA basic Victorian forcemeat is minced veal (or veal and a little fat pork) with breadcrumbs, an egg to bind, lemon zest, parsley and mace. Keep the layer thin — a thick core of stuffing will still be underdone when the meat is dry.
- TimingAn hour and a half to two hours suits a well-filled loin, but modern veal loin is lean and reaches its best at 145–150F internal. Check at the one-hour mark with a thermometer and judge by that rather than the clock; because the stuffing is raw minced meat and egg sealed inside the roll, it should read 165F.
- The kidneysVeal kidneys need ordering ahead from a butcher. If you steam them with the joint as suggested, note that they toughen with long cooking; browning them separately and adding them for the last twenty minutes avoids this.
- Capers"Bruised" means crushed lightly with the flat of a knife so they release their flavour into the sauce. Rinse salt-packed capers first; brined ones can go in as they are.
The dish is recognisably the German Kalbsnierenbraten s- loin of veal cooked with its kidneys s- crossed with the sour-cream-and-caper sauce that runs through northern and eastern German cookery, where soured cream did the work that butter or wine sauces did further west. Capers with veal is a long-standing pairing in that region, most familiarly in the K f6nigsberg style, and the acidity of both cream and capers is doing something practical: it lifts a meat that is mild to the point of blandness. The book gathered hundreds of such entries under national labels at a time when English middle-class households were being encouraged to look at continental methods, and the German recipes it prints tend to share this character s- modest quantities of liquid, close-covered pots, and a finishing sauce built from what the pot gave up. The instruction to "steam" reflects nineteenth-century usage, in which close-lidded pot cookery over gentle heat could often be described as steaming, whether or not the meat sat clear of the liquid.