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Veal Stew
Take about four pounds of veal, the chump end of the loin, or part of the leg, or a portion of the breast from which the bones have been removed will answer excellently for the purpose. Cut it into neat pieces about two inches square, or, if preferred, let it remain whole. Rub it over with butter, then put it into a stewpan with two moderate-sized onions thinly sliced, and turn it about over a clear fire till it is brightly browned. Dredge flour upon it, put with it the juice and thin rind of half a lemon, a lump of sugar, and a little pepper and salt, and then cover with some nicely-flavoured veal gravy. Cover the saucepan closely, and let its contents stew very gently till the meat is tender without being too much cooked. Pour most of the gravy into a clean saucepan, thicken it with a tea-spoonful of brown thickening, or with a table-spoonful of flour mixed smoothly with a little cold water, and a tea-spoonful of sugar browning. Add a dessert-spoonful of ketchup, half a glassful of sherry, and a few stewed mushrooms if these are to be had. Put the meat into the thickened gravy, let it get quite hot, then serve on a hot dish with the gravy poured over it. Fresh or pickled cucumber may accompany this dish. The gravy may be made by stewing the bones and trimmings of the veal for an hour or more in a quart of water with a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a blade of mace, and six or eight peppercorns. Time to stew the veal, one hour and a half to two hours. Probable cost, 4s. 10d., exclusive of the wine.
A plain brown veal stew of the late Victorian kitchen, built on a stock made from the meat's own bones. Most of what needs translating is in the thickening and colouring, which belong to a professional larder that no longer exists.
- The cutChump end of loin, leg or boned breast all work; breast is the cheapest and most forgiving because of its connective tissue. Veal shoulder, often sold as stewing veal where veal is available, is the closest modern equivalent at about 4 lb, cut into 2-inch pieces.
- "Ketchup" is not tomatoIn an English cookbook of this date ketchup means mushroom or walnut ketchup, a thin, dark, salty condiment. A dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons; a splash of mushroom ketchup or, failing that, Worcestershire sauce or a little soy gives the same savoury depth.
- Brown thickening and sugar browningBrown thickening is flour cooked in butter to a deep colour and kept in a jar; sugar browning is caramel cooked almost to bitterness and let down with water, used purely for colour. The recipe already offers the substitute for the first (a tablespoon of flour slaked in cold water); for the second, a dark roux or simply reducing the gravy does the same work.
- Half a glassful of sherryA Victorian 'wineglassful' as a kitchen measure is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so half a glass is roughly 1 fl oz, though actual glasses varied. A dry sherry such as amontillado suits better than a sweet cream sherry, since the recipe already carries sugar and lemon.
- The lemon rind"Thin rind" means pared with a peeler, no white pith, or the gravy turns bitter over a two-hour stew. Fish the strips out before the sauce is thickened.
- Keep it below a simmer"Stew very gently" is the hinge. Veal at a rolling boil goes stringy and squeezes out its moisture; hold the pan at a bare shiver, or move it to a 300F oven, and check for tenderness at 90 minutes.
- The gravyA quart of water with the bones and trimmings, parsley, thyme, a blade of mace and peppercorns gives a light stock, not a rich one; an hour is a minimum and two is better. A blade of mace is one piece of the lacy covering of nutmeg, and a pinch of ground mace stands in.
- Yield and servingFour pounds of veal serves six generously. Plain boiled potatoes or rice take the gravy well, and the pickled cucumber the recipe suggests is worth doing, as the acidity cuts the sweet-savoury sauce.
- The cost note4s 10d is the price of the ingredients in shillings and pence, and the recipe notes it excludes the wine; such figures were given so a housekeeper could compare dishes. It has no modern equivalent worth calculating, though veal appears to have been a more commonplace meat then than it is now.
Veal held a central place in nineteenth-century English cookery in a way it no longer does: dairy herds produced surplus male calves, and their pale, mild meat was the standard base for white sauces, forcemeats, pies and stock. This particular stew is a brown one, and it shows the period's habit of building flavour in layers that a modern cook would compress: brown the meat, dredge with flour, moisten with a stock made from the same animal's bones, then finish with a second, separately thickened and coloured sauce. The sugar lump, lemon and sherry belong to an older English taste for sweet-sour meat dishes that survived in stews and made sauces long after it had left the roast. Cassell's dictionaries of cookery, published in London from the 1870s onward and reissued in revised editions for decades, ran to thousands of alphabetically arranged entries and quoted a probable cost for many of them, which suggests a readership of middle-class housekeepers budgeting for a cook as much as cooks themselves.