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VEAL ROAST (a la Languedocienne)
Roast a joint of veal in the usual way, and baste liberally with good dripping. Half an hour before taking it up, baste with a mixture of oil and vinegar in which two anchovies and five or six peppercorns have been infused. When the veal is to be served, skim the gravy, and pour it round the joint in the dish.
The recipe assumes you already know how to roast veal and gives you only the flavouring that makes it Languedocienne. The whole point is the anchovy-and-vinegar baste applied late; everything else is scaffolding.
- The hinge: baste late, not earlyOil and vinegar with anchovy will scorch and turn acrid over a full roasting time. Applying it only in the last 30 minutes lets the acid reduce into the pan drippings and the anchovy melt without burning, which is exactly what the original intends.
- "A joint of veal"The recipe does not say which cut or what size. A boneless rolled shoulder or a loin of about 3-4 lb is a reasonable modern reading; a bone-in leg joint will want rather more weight for the same number of people.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none, and the "usual way" is not spelled out here. Modern practice for a veal roast is a hot start of about 425F for the first 20 minutes, then 325-350F for the remainder, reckoning roughly 25 minutes per pound at the lower setting.
- DonenessVeal is lean and unforgiving. Take it to 145F at the centre and rest it 15 minutes. Nineteenth-century roasting directions generally aimed at meat cooked well through by present-day standards, which may be part of why Victorian veal has a reputation for dryness.
- Dripping"good dripping" is fat saved from earlier roasts and kept in a crock; beef dripping is the commonest sort, is still sold, and is worth using here for flavour. Clarified butter or a neutral oil will do, but the dish loses some depth.
- The infusionWarm about 4 tablespoons olive oil with 2 tablespoons wine vinegar, two anchovy fillets and five or six peppercorns until the anchovies break down, then strain or crush them in. Salt-packed anchovies want rinsing first; oil-packed fillets can go straight in.
- SeasoningAnchovy carries a good deal of salt, so season the joint lightly at the start and correct the gravy at the end rather than the reverse.
- Skimming the gravyThere will be a surprising amount of fat from the dripping. Tilt the tin and spoon it off, or pour everything into a jug and let it separate for a few minutes; what remains is a thin, sharp, anchovy-scented jus rather than a thickened gravy, and it should be poured round the joint, not over it.
A la Languedocienne in nineteenth-century kitchen French points loosely to the cooking of Languedoc in the south of France; such regional tags were applied elastically, and the label is often associated with olive oil rather than butter, garlic, and the salted anchovy that Mediterranean cooks used as a seasoning long before it was thought of as a topping, though the classic garnish of that name is more usually described in terms of aubergine, tomato and garlic. Anchovy as a savoury background note was thoroughly familiar to British cooks too, by way of anchovy essence and Worcestershire-type sauces, which is part of why a regional French treatment like this one could sit unremarked in a general English dictionary of cookery. Entries of this kind seem to have been treated as variations on a technique explained elsewhere in the book, hence the breezy "roast in the usual way" and the assumption that a jar of dripping stands ready by the range. Veal itself was far more central to Victorian middle-class cooking than it is now, valued for its pale meat and gelatinous bones, and a plain roast joint made a natural canvas for a dressing of this sort.