Home › The Principles of Cookery › Veal, Shoulder of, Stuffed and Stewed
Veal, Shoulder of, Stuffed and Stewed
Remove the blade-bone from a shoulder of veal. Season the inside with salt, cayenne, and grated nutmeg, sprinkle over it minced savoury herbs (such as parsley and chives), together with a few mushrooms, and spread over these thin slices of ham or bacon. Roll the veal, and bind it tightly with tape. Put it, in a saucepan which will just hold it, over a clear fire with a slice of butter or a piece of dripping, and turn it about till lightly browned all over, or, if preferred, roast it for an hour and a half. Take it up, put it into a deep dish, cover with good stock, and add two onions, a sliced carrot, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, a blade of mace, and a little pepper and salt. Stew the veal very gently in a moderate oven till it is so tender that a skewer will pierce it easily. Strain and skim the gravy, and thicken a portion of it with a little brown thickening. Place the veal on a dish, pour the sauce over, and garnish with sliced lemon and parsley. Stewed mushrooms, green peas, and various kinds of dressed vegetables may be served with this dish. Some cooks, instead of first browning the meat, put it at once into a dish, pour stock over it, surround it with herbs, onions, carrots, etc., then cover the dish with a coarse paste of flour and water, and bake the veal in a moderate oven. Though the taste of the veal thus cooked is excellent, its appearance is not so good as when it is browned as above. Time to bake the veal; a shoulder which weighs ten pounds before it is boned will need five hours. Probable cost, 8 1/2d. per pound.
A rolled, stuffed veal shoulder braised long and slow — a large joint by modern standards, and the timings scale with weight rather than following the book's five hours blindly.
- The jointA 10 lb bone-in shoulder yields roughly 7-8 lb boned and rolled. Veal shoulder is often sold already boned at around 4-6 lb; ask for it in one piece with the blade bone removed so you can lay the stuffing flat. Scale the aromatics down for a smaller roll and test for tenderness early rather than assuming the time falls in step with the weight.
- Oven temperaturesA "moderate oven" here is 325-350F. For a braise this long, 325F is safer against the outside drying; the meat is done when a skewer meets no resistance, around 195F internally, not at a set clock time.
- Tape means twineCotton tape was standard for binding rolled joints. Butcher's twine at 1-inch intervals does the same job; tie firmly enough to hold the cylinder but not so tight that the stuffing squeezes out.
- Brown thickeningThis is flour cooked in butter or dripping until nut-brown — a brown roux kept on hand in Victorian kitchens. Whisk it into the strained, skimmed braising liquid off the boil, or simply reduce the liquid and finish with a beurre manié.
- Blade of maceA blade is one piece of the dried aril of nutmeg, roughly a quarter teaspoon of ground mace as a substitute. Fish it out with the bay and thyme before straining.
- Cover itThe recipe puts the joint into a deep dish and covers it with good stock. If you braise it in a pot, cover tightly with a lid or foil; some cooks prefer to bring the liquid only two-thirds up the roll rather than submerging it.
- The paste variantThe "coarse paste of flour and water" is the kind of seal often called a huff paste: a flour-and-water crust used to trap steam, generally not eaten. Foil crimped over the rim achieves the same and lets you check progress.
- Yield and restA boned 5 lb roll serves eight to ten. Rest it 20 minutes before untying and slicing across the roll so each slice shows the spiral of ham and herbs.
- The cost line8½d per pound is the price the book gives for its own day. It has no bearing on what you will pay now.
Rolled and stuffed shoulder joints belong to a long European tradition of turning an awkwardly shaped, sinewy cut into something carvable: bone it, season the inner surface, roll, tie, and cook it slowly until the connective tissue turns to gelatine. Cassell's gives both the browned version and the sealed-dish version, and its remark that the unbrowned meat tastes excellent but looks worse is a fair statement of the trade-off between a Maillard crust and pure steamed sweetness. Veal was a mainstay of nineteenth-century British and French cookery in a way it no longer is; dairy herds produced surplus male calves, and the pale, mild meat suited the era's taste for delicate white stews and forcemeats, hence the ham or bacon laid inside here to supply the salt and savour the veal itself lacks. The garnish of sliced lemon and parsley is often said to have been the customary accompaniment to veal in this period, though how fixed a convention it really was is harder to establish.