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CHAPTER XLIV: Veal
Veal Roasted with Mushrooms.
Bone a loin of veal. Remove the kidneys and fat, and lay them, after splitting in two, inside the loin. Season inside with pepper and salt, and fold over the flap to inclose the kidneys. Roll and tie securely with string, making the roast oblong shape.
Cover the bottom of the roasting pan with thin slices of fat pork, a sliced onion, and chopped parsley. Lay the meat on top, and moisten with a little cream. Have the oven rather slow at first, basting the veal frequently with a little cream. When nearly done, sprinkle with fine bread crumbs, moisten with melted butter, and let it brown. Take out the veal, untie, sprinkle Parmesan cheese over it, set in a very hot oven, surround with broiled mushrooms, and pour over the strained liquid left in the roasting pan.
Veal Savory (French recipe). 1½ pounds ham, 3 pounds raw veal, 6 hard-boiled eggs, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 tablespoonful flour.
Cut the veal and ham into small pieces. Cut eggs in slices, lay part of them in the bottom of a well-buttered earthenware dish, sprinkle with minced parsley, then put in a layer of veal and ham, with salt and pepper to season. Proceed with these alternate layers until all is used, then add just enough water to cover it, with butter rolled in flour and divided into tiny portions dotted over the top.
Tie a buttered paper over the dish, and bake one hour in a hot oven. Remove the paper, lay a plate over the meat with a weight to keep it in place, and let it remain another hour in a slow oven. When cold, turn out and garnish with small lettuce leaves VEAL filled with cold peas dressed with a Brown Stew. ittle mayonnaise.
Veal Loaf. 4 pounds raw lean veal, + pound ham, + pound salt pork, 1 cupful stale bread crumbs, 1 cupful melted butter, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 teaspoonful paprika, 1 teaspoonful onion juice, 1 teaspoonful allspice, 1 teaspoonful nutmeg, 1 teaspoonful cloves, 1 lemon, juice and rind, 2 eggs.
Chop very fine the veal, ham, and salt pork. Mix with meat the bread crumbs soaked in milk, butter, seasonings, and well-beaten eggs. Press into a buttered bread pan, cover the top with lardoons of salt pork; bake one hour. Cut when cold into thin slices.
Curried Veal Cutlets.
Trim cutlets into uniform shape and size; dip in the beaten yolks of eggs, and cover with grated bread crumbs that have been mixed with 2 tablespoonfuls curry powder and a tablespoonful salt. Fry in butter till brown. Take out of the spider, and in it melt and brown a little butter and flour, add a cupful water, and pour over the cutlets.
Veal Hearts (Spanish recipe). 4 slices bacon, 1 sliced onion, 4 veal hearts, 1 cupful stock, minced pimento, 1 teaspoonful salt, bay leaf.
Fry bacon to a crisp, remove from the spider, and crisp the sliced onion in the hot fat. Trim and wash hearts, slice them, roll in flour, and fry in hot fat. Add to the fat in the pan the stock, pimento, salt, and bay leaf.
Pour the mixture over the hearts, and cook two hours. Five minutes before serving, add the bacon. 2 pounds veal, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, 1 pint water, 1 teaspoonful salt, Dash pepper, Slice onion, 1 teaspoonful kitchen bouquet. 1 bay leaf.
Cut the veal into cubes and roll in flour. Put 2 tablespoonfuls butter into a pan; when hot, add the meat, and stir constantly until browned.
Dust with the flour, mix, add the water; stir, add the salt and pepper, onion, kitchen bouquet, and bay leaf.
Cover, and simmer gently for an hour.
Veal Cutlets.
Divide the cutlet into pieces about four inches square; dip in egg, then in crumbs; fry for five minutes. Add cupful boiling water, and let simmer for an hour. Dish, and serve with bits of lemon.
Ragout of Veal.
Cut the meat in thin slices, put 2 tablespoonfuls butter in a pan, dredge with flour, and fry light brown. Take out the meat and put into the pan a cupful cold stock or gravy, season with salt and pepper and a tablespoonful tomato catsup. Lay a few slices of cold ham in the gravy, also the veal. Serve very hot.
Veal Oysters.
Cut 1 pounds veal cutlets into pieces the size of large oysters; season with 1 tablespoonful salt, dust with flour, dip into beaten egg, roll in bread crumbs, and fry light brown on both sides. Serve on a hot dish; garnish with lemon quarters.
Veal Birds (English recipe).
Cut thin slices of veal into pieces two and a half by four inches. Chop the trimmings of the meat fine with one small slice of fat salt pork and half as much cracker crumbs as there MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK is meat. Season highly with salt, cayenne, and onion juice, moisten with beaten egg and a little hot water. Spread each slice of veal with this mixture and roll tightly; fasten with a toothpick. Dredge with flour, pepper, and salt, and fry slowly in hot butter. Add ½ cupful cream, and simmer twenty minutes. Remove the fastenings, put the birds on toast, pour the cream over them, garnish with points of lemon, and serve.
Wiener Schnitzel (German recipe). 2 pounds veal steak, 1 egg, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 tablespoonful lard, ½ teaspoonful capers, 6 anchovies, Lemon.
Cut the veal in slices half an inch thick and three inches square; pare the corners round; beat lightly to flatten; season with salt and dust with flour; dip each cutlet in egg, cover with fine crumbs, and pat smooth with a knife. Fifteen minutes before serving, place a pan with the butter and lard over the fire; as soon as hot, put in the cutlets, fry light brown. Arrange on a warm dish; lay in the center of each schnitzel½ teaspoonful capers. Soak the anchovies in cold water; remove the skin and bones; divide in halves, roll them up; place 2 of these rolls on each schnitzel with lemon cut in two. Garnish with water cress or parsley, and serve. Smothered Veal.
A run of veal dishes from a single chapter, ranging from a boned and rolled loin roast to a weighted terrine and a pressed loaf. Most translate directly; a few need the oven numbers and vessel names filled in.
- Oven temperatures"Rather slow" is 300-325F, "hot" is 400-425F, and the "very hot" oven for browning the Parmesan crust on the loin is 475F or a broiler. The Veal Savory goes into a hot oven at 400F for its first hour, then down to 300F under its weight for the second.
- A spider is a skilletThe word survives here for a cast-iron frying pan, originally a legged one that stood over coals. Any heavy skillet does the work, and it wants to be one you can deglaze in, since several of these recipes build the sauce in the same pan.
- Kitchen bouquetA commercial caramel-and-vegetable browning liquid, still sold under that name. A teaspoon darkens the brown stew's gravy and adds very little flavour; a splash of soy or a spoon of concentrated stock does the same job.
- Boning the loinOrder this from a butcher rather than attempting it on a bone-in loin at home, and ask for the kidney and its suet left attached. Modern veal loin is sold trimmed of kidney fat by default, so it must be requested.
- Veal loaf seasoningA teaspoon each of allspice, nutmeg and cloves against four pounds of meat is heavy by current taste but deliberate: the loaf is meant to be eaten cold in thin slices, and cold meat mutes spice sharply. "Lardoons of salt pork" are strips laid across the top to baste it; bacon serves. No oven temperature is given; at a moderate heat one hour will not carry this much dense forcemeat through, so cook to an internal 160F, which is likely to take closer to ninety minutes.
- Cooling the pressed terrineThe Veal Savory is weighted and left to set. Weight it in the refrigerator, not on the counter, and slice within three or four days; there is no cure or seal here, only cooked meat and egg in jelly.
- Cutlets fried then simmeredBreaded veal cutlets fried five minutes and then simmered an hour in water will shed their coating and go stringy. The Wiener Schnitzel in the same chapter gives the better treatment: fry through and serve at once.
- Veal heartsTwo hours of gentle simmering is right for sliced heart, which is lean working muscle and needs the time to turn tender. Keep the pan barely bubbling; a hard boil tightens it.
- YieldsThe boned loin serves six to eight, the veal loaf ten or more as cold cuts, the brown stew four, and the Wiener Schnitzel four to six depending on how thin the slices are beaten.
Veal occupied a good deal of space in American cookbooks of the period because dairying and meat production were the same industry: bull calves were a by-product of milk herds, and their meat was cheap, mild and abundant. A chapter like this one shows the range that cheapness allowed, from a dressed loin roast finished with Parmesan and mushrooms to hearts stewed with pimento and bacon. The national labels are the period's shorthand for style rather than provenance -- "French" for the layered, weighted, jellied dish served cold with mayonnaise, "German" for the crumbed schnitzel with its capers and rolled anchovies, "English" for the stuffed and rolled veal birds, a form recorded in British cookery well before this book and named for the trussed shape rather than any bird. The instruction to serve cutlets "the size of large oysters" belongs to the same habit of naming meat after something else it resembles, which had already given English mock turtle, Scotch woodcock and a long line of similar conceits.