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VEAL, LOIN OF, STUFFED AND BRAISED (to eat cold)
Take a loin of veal with two neck-bones. Bone it, and stuff with good veal forcemeat. Wrap the sides round the forcemeat, skewer the joint firmly, and bind with tape, keeping it as oblong as possible. Wrap it in a napkin, tie the ends securely, and tie the meat also across in two or three places to keep it in shape. Place it on a bed of sliced vegetables in a braising-pan, cover with as much stock as will barely reach to the edge of the surface of the veal, close the stewpan, and boil and simmer the veal very gently for four hours. Take the stewpan from the fire, but do not take out the veal until the liquor is cool. Remove the napkin, tie the meat in a clean one, put over it a dish with a heavy weight upon it, and let it remain until the next day. Trim neatly, brush over with liquid glaze, and garnish with aspic jelly, parsley, etc. This dish will be much improved if three or four truffles finely minced, a little red tongue, and the veal kidney finely minced, be added to the forcemeat. Time to braise the veal, four hours.
A Victorian galantine in all but name: a boned loin rolled round forcemeat, braised, pressed under weight overnight and served cold in glaze and aspic. Most of the work is in the shaping and the chilling, not the cooking.
- The hinge: press it cold, and press it in the refrigeratorThe set of the joint depends on being weighted while it cools, but a large piece of cooked meat left out overnight is exactly the condition Clostridium perfringens thrives in. Lift the veal from the liquor once it is cool enough to handle, wrap and weight it, and put the whole arrangement into the refrigerator for the overnight press.
- The cut"A loin of veal with two neck-bones" most likely means the loin taken with a couple of vertebrae still attached at the fore end; ask a butcher for a boned and trimmed veal loin, skin and sinew removed but the flap left long enough to wrap round the stuffing. A joint of about 4-5 lb after boning is a workable size.
- Veal forcemeatThe recipe specifies only "good veal forcemeat"; a period veal forcemeat is minced veal, or veal and fat bacon, bound with breadcrumbs, egg, lemon peel, herbs and mace. Roughly 1 lb of forcemeat should fill a loin of this size. Truffles, minced veal kidney and red tongue are the luxury version the recipe itself offers; cured tongue is the closest modern equivalent to "red tongue".
- Tape and napkinButcher's twine replaces the tape. For the napkin use a double layer of scalded muslin or cheesecloth, which is easier to unwrap than a linen cloth and lets you re-wrap in a clean one for pressing.
- The braiseA braising-pan is any deep pot with a close lid; the sliced vegetables (onion, carrot, celery) are a bed to keep the meat off the base and to flavour the stock. Stock should come almost but not quite to the top of the joint, and the liquid should never do more than shiver / 180F or so. A hard boil will squeeze the forcemeat out of shape.
- Four hours, and what to check insteadFour hours at a bare simmer suits a large boned loin, but go by an instant-read thermometer into the centre of the forcemeat: 165F, the recommended figure for a stuffing containing raw minced meat and egg. A smaller joint may reach that in two and a half to three hours.
- Liquid glazeGlaze here is glace de viande / braising liquor strained, defatted and reduced until it coats a spoon and sets tacky. Brush it on cold meat in thin coats. Aspic can be made by clarifying more of the same liquor, or with good stock and gelatine.
- Yield and servingA 4-5 lb boned loin, stuffed, gives 10-12 cold servings. Carve in thin slices across the roll so each shows a section of forcemeat; it keeps three or four days refrigerated and slices best straight from the cold.
Cold pressed meats of this kind were the backbone of the late-Victorian buffet, supper table and picnic hamper / dishes that could be built a day ahead, glazed and garnished to look impressive, and carved without a hot kitchen behind them. The technique is essentially that of a galantine, a French preparation generally traced to boned and stuffed poultry, borrowed here for veal, whose pale flesh, mild flavour and abundant natural gelatine make it the classic cold-larder meat: it sets firm under weight, takes glaze cleanly and slices without crumbling. The recipe drills the whole grammar of the cold joint at once / boning, forcemeat, wrapping in a cloth, braising on a vegetable bed, pressing, glazing, garnishing with aspic. The truffle, tongue and kidney addition at the end marks the difference between a household dish and a company one, tongue in particular being a cheap way to put a band of red through a pale slice.