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Veal Stew, with Green Peas
Stew the veal as before. Add to the other ingredients a pint or more of freshly-shelled green peas. Let the veal stew till it is three-parts cooked, put in with it a lettuce finely shredded, and let the meat stew half an hour after this is added. Thicken the gravy, and serve the veal on a hot dish with the gravy and peas poured over it. Time, about two hours.
A variation entry that leans on the plain veal stew printed immediately before it, so the base is assumed rather than given. The points below fill in what a modern cook has to supply.
- "As before"The recipe points back to the plain veal stew printed immediately before it, which is not reproduced on this page; a stew of that kind would use a cut such as breast, shoulder or shin, barely covered with liquid, with simple aromatics and salt. For a modern version, allow about 2 lb of boneless veal shoulder cut in 1½-inch pieces, or 3 lb bone-in breast.
- A pint of peasThat is a pint by volume of already-shelled peas, and an imperial pint at that, so nearer 2½ US cups, roughly 12 oz, and something like 2½ lb in the pod. Frozen petits pois work, but add them in the last 5 minutes rather than at the start with the other ingredients, since they are blanched already.
- The lettuce is the pointA shredded cos or butter lettuce added toward the end melts into the gravy and gives the sweet, faintly grassy background that distinguishes this from a plain stew. It should collapse, not survive as leaves; do not substitute iceberg, which turns watery.
- Three-parts cookedFor shoulder that is roughly 60-75 minutes of gentle simmering, when the meat yields to a fork but still holds its shape. Note that the peas go in at the start with the other ingredients; it is the lettuce that is added at this stage and given the final half hour.
- Keep it at a trembleVeal stewed at a rolling boil goes stringy and the gravy turns cloudy. Hold the surface at the barest shiver, lid ajar, either on the lowest burner or in a 300F oven.
- Thickening the gravyThe period method is a beurre manié or a flour-and-butter roux whisked in off the boil, about 1 oz each per pint of liquid; a slurry of 1 tablespoon flour in cold water works as well. Do it after the peas are in, and let it cook 3-4 minutes to lose the raw flour taste.
- SeasoningA white veal stew tastes flat without correction at the end: salt, white pepper, and a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of cream. Cassell's assumes the cook does this without being told.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of meat with a pint of peas serves four generously. Boiled new potatoes or plain rice absorb the gravy; warm the serving dish, as the recipe insists, because a veal gravy thickened with flour sets quickly on a cold plate.
Veal with green peas and lettuce is a summer dish of the English kitchen often linked to French blanquette and fricassée practice, where the meat is simmered pale rather than browned, and it appears in cookery books from the eighteenth century onward as a way of using the year's first shelled peas alongside the young meat that arrived with the same season. The shredded lettuce is the older habit here: before lettuce was assumed to be salad it was routinely stewed, braised or put into soups, and cooks valued it for the sweetness and body it lends a broth. In Cassell's the recipe follows a plain veal stew, which is why this one opens by telling the reader to stew the veal "as before" and says nothing further about the meat at all.