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Veal Stew, Piquant
Take two pounds of lean veal from the fillet. Cut it into pieces half an inch square, season with salt and pepper, dredge them with flour, and fry in butter till lightly browned. Fry with them a moderate-sized cucumber sliced and floured, a quarter of a pint of green gooseberries opened and seeded, a shredded lettuce, and a few onions, if liked. Whilst they are being fried move the vegetables about to keep them from burning. Lift the ingredients into a saucepan, pour over them gradually as much boiling stock or water as will barely cover them. Let them simmer gently till the meat is tender. Serve very hot. Time to stew the veal, etc., about an hour. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A brown veal stew whose character comes entirely from the sour green gooseberries — treat them as the point of the dish rather than an oddity to be left out.
- The hinge: unripe gooseberriesThese are hard, green, acidic fruit picked well before ripeness, used here as a souring agent much as one would use verjuice or lemon. Ripe dessert gooseberries will make the stew sweet and muddy; if you cannot get green ones, substitute a similar volume of tart green grapes or thin slices of tart apple plus a squeeze of lemon, and accept that the result is a different dish.
- A quarter of a pintIn an imperial pint of 20 fl oz, a quarter pint is 5 fl oz, so roughly two-thirds of a US cup of prepared fruit. "Opened and seeded" means splitting each berry and scraping out the pips.
- Veal from the filletThe fillet is the leg, not the tenderloin as the word now implies. Any lean boneless leg or shoulder veal works; half-inch dice from the shoulder will be more forgiving over an hour of simmering.
- Flour and butterThe dredging flour is the only thickener, so brown the meat in batches in a wide pan rather than crowding it — steamed meat sheds its coating and the sauce stays thin. Butter alone scorches at this temperature; a little oil with it keeps the fond from blackening.
- Cucumber as a vegetableCooked cucumber appears in nineteenth-century English cookery books and behaves rather like a marrow, going soft and slightly translucent. Peel it, and if it is a modern watery salad cucumber, seed it and salt the slices for twenty minutes before flouring.
- Barely coverFollow this literally. The dish is meant to finish with a short, glossy, sharp sauce clinging to the meat; extra liquid gives you a pale soup that no amount of reduction will quite recover.
- Time and donenessAn hour of bare simmering is right for half-inch dice — the surface should barely tremble. Veal boiled hard turns dry and stringy even while it is still technically tender.
- Yield and servingFour to five portions, as stated. Rice, plain boiled potatoes or bread are wanted to carry the sauce. Taste at the end: the gooseberries may need a pinch of sugar to bring the acid into balance.
- Probable cost3s. 6d. is the compiler's estimate of what the ingredients for the whole dish would come to, given so a cook could budget against a household allowance. It has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
Sourness from unripe fruit is one of the oldest seasonings in English cooking, and the gooseberry was widely used for it in northern Europe — English kitchen gardens grew hundreds of named varieties in the nineteenth century, and hard green fruit was used in sauces as well as ripe fruit at dessert. The pairing with meat survives most familiarly in gooseberry sauce for mackerel, and the same logic operates here: bland, pale veal is lifted by acid rather than by spice. Cassell's was compiled as a working dictionary for households running on seasonal produce. The cucumber and shredded lettuce mark the recipe as high summer, when gooseberries, cucumbers and lettuce would all have been coming out of the same garden at once.