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Veal, Ragout Of
Cut some neat slices from a knuckle of veal, season with pepper and salt and dredge with flour, and fry in butter until of a pale brown. Then put them into a saucepan with a pint of hot, rich white stock, and simmer very gently for two hours. Take out the meat, and thicken the gravy. Add a table-spoonful of tomato sauce, the same of ketchup, and the juice of half a lemon. Give one boil up put back the meat for a few minutes, and serve hot.
A straightforward braise from the veal knuckle, the cheap end of the animal, cooked long enough to soften the connective tissue. The recipe assumes a stockpot on the go and a cook who knows what "thicken the gravy" means.
- The cutA knuckle of veal is the shank, the same cut sold as osso buco. Ask for boneless shank sliced about half an inch thick, or buy crosscut shanks and take the meat off the bone after browning. Veal shoulder works but gives a less gelatinous sauce.
- Rich white stockVictorian white stock was typically veal bones and trimmings simmered without browning, so it often set to jelly when cold and gave the sauce body. A good unsalted veal or chicken stock is the substitute; one that gels when chilled will give a sauce with more body, though the flour thickening will thicken it either way.
- A pintAn imperial pint, 20 fl oz, so about 2 1/2 US cups. That is barely enough to cover the meat; the recipe has you lift the meat out and thicken what remains rather than discard it.
- Two hours is rightThis is the one timing in the recipe not to shorten. Shank needs the full two hours at a bare tremble for the collagen to turn to gelatin. Boiling instead of simmering will squeeze the meat dry and cloud the sauce.
- ThickeningOne period method is a butter-and-flour paste (beurre manie): equal weights of soft butter and flour worked together and whisked into the hot liquid off the boil, about a tablespoon of each per cup of gravy; a plain or browned roux was equally common. Then bring it to the single boil the recipe calls for.
- KetchupIn Victorian British usage this often means mushroom ketchup, a thin dark salty condiment, distinct from the tomato sauce named separately in the same sentence. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; Worcestershire sauce is sometimes offered as a stand-in, used sparingly.
- Tomato sauceNot the sweet bottled kind. A plain cooked tomato purée or passata is closer to what was meant, and a tablespoon is there for acidity and colour rather than tomato flavour.
- FinishingReturn the meat only long enough to heat through, three or four minutes. The recipe boils the lemon juice in with the sauces; adding it at the end instead will keep more of its sharpness.
- YieldThe recipe gives no weight of meat. A pint of stock with roughly a pound and a half of sliced shank would serve three, four if it is going over rice or plain boiled potatoes to catch the gravy.
A ragout -- the word is usually traced to the French ragoûter, to revive the appetite -- meant any dish of meat cut small and cooked in a well-flavoured sauce, and by the nineteenth century English cookery had absorbed the word for exactly this kind of thrifty braise. The knuckle carried little saleable meat but a great deal of gelatin, and was the usual foundation of the white stock the same recipe then calls for. Tomato sauce and ketchup were both available as commercial bottled goods by the 1880s, though cookery books of the period also gave recipes for making both at home, so which the writer assumed is not clear from the page. Veal was commoner on the British table then than now, calves being a by-product of the dairy herd.