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VEAL, NECK OF, BRAISED (a la Barbarie)
Braise the best end of a neck of veal according to the instructions already given, and before doing so lard it with strips of truffles (see VEAL, NECK OF, LARDED). Put bacon over the veal in the pan to preserve the colour of the meat, and send Italian sauce to table as an accompaniment.
Cassell's assumes you have already read its entries on braising and on larding a neck of veal, so what is left here is essentially a garnish and a sauce. The parts that need translating are the cut, the barding, and the sauce.
- "Best end of neck"This is the rib end of the veal neck — in modern butchery a rack or rib roast of veal, bones in. A 3-4 lb piece serves six. Ask for it chined so it carves cleanly.
- Braising, in practiceBrown the joint in butter, set it on a bed of sliced carrot, onion and a bouquet, add stock to come a third of the way up, cover tightly and cook in a low oven, around 325F, for roughly 2 hours, until a skewer meets no resistance. Cassell's specifies no temperature; the figure is a modern equivalent for its cross-referenced braising method. Neck of veal is collagen-rich and wants time, not high heat.
- Larding with trufflesThe cross-referenced method means driving a larding needle through the meat and drawing in batons of truffle so the slices show black flecks when carved. Truffle at this price makes it an occasion dish; thin strips of blanched bacon fat with a little truffle peel driven alongside gives most of the effect.
- The bacon on topThis is barding, not seasoning. Veal has almost no fat cover and browns to a dull grey under a lid, so a sheet of fat bacon or fresh pork fatback laid over the top keeps the surface pale and moist. Lift it off for the last twenty minutes if you want colour.
- Italian sauceSauce italienne of the period is a brown sauce — reduced demi-glace — finished with a duxelles of finely chopped mushroom and shallot, a little white wine, chopped ham, and chopped parsley and tarragon. A modern kitchen may instead build it on the strained, degreased braising liquid reduced hard, which is the same idea with less scaffolding.
- Don't waste the braising liquidStrain it, chill briefly, lift the fat, and reduce it to a glaze to brush the joint before carving. That, more than the larding, is what makes braised veal taste of something.
- Resting and carvingRest the joint 15 minutes under foil before cutting down between the ribs, so the truffle-studded slices hold together.
Braised veal in the grand style is a set piece of nineteenth-century professional cookery, and Cassell's treats it exactly as a chef's manual would: one master method for braising, one for larding, and then a run of named variations distinguished only by garnish and sauce. The a la tag was a filing system as much as a description — a cook reading "a la Barbarie" was expected to recognise a particular finish rather than trace it to a place, and the sense of the name here is not documented in the book itself. Veal held this prestige because it was the meat of dairy country and of towns with a milk trade: pale, mild, and so lean that it had to be larded and barded to survive long slow cooking, which is why nearly every classical veal roast comes wrapped in someone else's fat. Sauce italienne, despite the name, is a French kitchen preparation codified in the Carême-to-Escoffier line of brown sauces, and its mushroom-and-shallot duxelles base was one of the standard ways of giving a mild meat some savour.