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Veal Tendons, Curried
Take the tendons from one or two breasts of veal, being careful in doing so not to spoil the joints for stewing or roasting. Put them into a deep stewpan with two carrots, two onions (each stuck with a clove), a strip of lemon-rind, a bay-leaf, a bunch of parsley, and a sprig of thyme. Pour over them a pint of good stock, and let them simmer gently till tender. Take them up carefully with a skimmer, pull out any hard parts that may remain, and press the tendons between two dishes till cold. Strain the liquor in which they were stewed, and when it is cool free it from fat. Slice two onions, and fry them in butter with a finely-minced apple. Stir these in a saucepan over the fire til they are soft, rub them through a sieve, and mix with the pulp a dessert-spoonful of curry-paste, a tea-spoonful of curry-powder, and a dessert-spoonful of ground rice. Add the stock gradually, and stir the sauce over the fire till it boils. Cut the tendons into rounds, squares, or diamonds half an inch thick, and about an inch and a half across. Put them into the curry sauce, and let them remain until they are heated through. Dish them alternately with fried rashers of bacon in a circle on a hot dish, and pour the curry sauce over and round them. Send rice boiled for curry to table on a separate dish. Time, four hours to simmer the tendons. Probable cost, uncertain, the tendons being sold with the breast of veal.
A Victorian butcher's-economy dish: the gristly cartilage tips from a breast of veal, braised to gelatinous softness and finished in a mild curry sauce. The whole thing hinges on the long, slow first cooking.
- What the tendons areNot sinew but the flat cartilage at the rib ends of a breast of veal, sometimes sold as veal breast cartilage or riblet tips. They are not usually kept on display and will generally need ordering in advance; without them, the recipe has no subject.
- Four hours means four hoursThe cartilage must break down to a translucent, yielding gelatine. Undercooked it stays rubbery and no amount of sauce hides it. A gentle simmer with the pan barely trembling, or a 300F oven in a covered pot, gives the same result with less watching.
- Pressing between two dishesThis is a set-and-chill step: the gelatine firms as it cools, so the slab can be cut into clean rounds or diamonds. Put a weight on the upper dish and refrigerate several hours or overnight. Skipping it leaves shapeless pieces.
- A pint of stockA British Imperial pint, so 20 Imperial fl oz, about 568 ml or roughly 2 1/3 US cups. It should barely cover the tendons; top up with water if it does not.
- Curry-paste and curry-powderBoth were commercial products of the period rather than freshly ground regional blends. A dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons; a teaspoonful, 1 teaspoon. The recipe mixes both into the sieved onion-and-apple pulp; some cooks prefer instead to bloom the paste in the butter with the onions for more depth.
- Ground rice as thickenerGround rice, not rice flour of the fine modern sort, though rice flour substitutes directly. It gives a lighter body than a butter-and-flour roux; add the stock slowly or it lumps.
- Reheat, do not boil hardThe cut tendons only need warming through in the finished sauce. A vigorous boil melts the set gelatine and the pieces slump back into shapelessness.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number served; two breasts' worth of tendons would make a modest made dish for perhaps four, alongside plain boiled rice and the bacon rashers, which supply most of the salt and fat.
Curried tendons belong to the Anglo-Indian repertoire that ran through nineteenth-century English cookery books, where curry powder was less a cuisine than a technique for making cheap or gelatinous cuts interesting. The dish demonstrates thrift: the tendons are a by-product, sold with the breast and costed at nothing, and the instruction not to spoil the joint for stewing or roasting shows a kitchen expected to get several dishes from one purchase. The taste for gelatinous textures, calf's foot, cow-heel, tendon, pig's ear, was general in Victorian cooking and has largely left the British table while remaining central in Chinese, Vietnamese and Mexican kitchens. The apple fried with the onions is a standard English curry-sauce sweetener of the era.