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Veal Tendons, Stewed, and Served with Mixed Vegetables
Stew the tendons as before. Warm them in gravy, glaze them, and serve in a circle on a dish with a mixture of vegetables boiled separately and heated in a little good white sauce.
A cross-reference recipe of the kind Victorian dictionaries relied on: the method sits under an earlier entry, and this one only tells you how to finish and plate. Everything hinges on the long braise that the text assumes you have already done.
- What a "tendon" isNot sinew but tendrons de veau: the strip of soft rib cartilage and meat cut from the breast of veal, below the ribs. Ask a butcher for breast of veal, or for the cartilaginous tips, cut into fingers about 3 inches long and an inch wide.
- "Stew as before"The usual method is a blanch, then a slow braise in a light stock with root vegetables, tightly covered, until the cartilage turns translucent and yielding. Reckon on roughly 2 to 2.5 hours at a bare simmer; the book gives no oven temperature. The cut is done when a skewer meets no resistance in the gristle.
- Press themCooked tendons were often cooled flat under a weighted tray before reheating, which sets them into neat even pieces that glaze cleanly. The recipe says nothing of this.
- GlazingTo glaze here means to brush repeatedly with reduced, sticky braising liquid over heat until the surface shines and darkens. Reduce the strained cooking liquor to a syrupy consistency first; a modern reduction of veal stock does the same job.
- "Good white sauce"Probably a sauce built on the veal cooking liquor, though 'white sauce' in English books of this date could equally mean a milk-based one. Keep it loose enough to coat the vegetables without pooling.
- Vegetables boiled separatelyThe instruction matters. Carrots, turnips, peas and green beans each cook at their own rate and bleed colour into one another; cook each, refresh, then combine and warm through in the sauce at the last minute.
- PlatingThe tendons ring the dish and the vegetables fill the centre, which means the glazed pieces must be dry and firm, not sauced. Sauce only the vegetables.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; a breast of veal produces only a modest amount of tendon. Serve immediately; the glaze dulls as it cools.
Tendrons de veau are a cheap cut of the breast turned into a garnish, and their presence in a reference work of this kind reflects how far French restaurant practice had reached into the English middle-class kitchen by the later nineteenth century. The breast is among the cheapest parts of the calf, and slow braising turns the rib cartilage gelatinous and rich -- the same principle that makes pig's trotters and oxtail worth eating. The presentation described here, a ring of glazed meat with separately cooked vegetables in the middle, is close to the period's a la jardiniere arrangements. Cassell's Dictionary was compiled as a reference work rather than a narrative cookbook, which is why entries like this one read as a variation on a method given elsewhere rather than a complete recipe.