Roast Veal
Plunge into boiling water, dry with a clean cloth; rub well with pepper and salt, then with butter. Dredge with flour, and put into a pan with two teacups of boiling water, a slice of bacon or pork, minced onion and parsley, pepper and salt. Set in a hot oven; simmer, baste and brown. Veal is longer cooking than lamb. When a light brown, with a pin, stick on a buttered paper to prevent dryness. Thicken the gravy with brown flour, if brown gravy is wanted, but always with mashed Irish potato if white gravy is desired.--Mrs. S. T.
A lean roast handled the way most nineteenth-century cooks handled veal: sealed, barded with pork fat, and kept moist with paper and constant basting. The instructions assume you know your cut and your oven, so the details below fill in what the original leaves unsaid.
- The hinge: veal has no fat of its ownThe hinge: veal is very lean -- Everything here — the bacon, the butter, the water in the pan, the buttered paper — exists to keep a very lean meat from drying. Skip the barding and basting and you get a grey, stringy roast, whatever the oven does.
- TeacupA teacup was commonly reckoned at about 3/4 cup, so two teacups is roughly 1 1/2 cups of boiling water in the bottom of the pan. It is there to make gravy and steam, not to poach the joint.
- "A hot oven"Conventionally read as roughly 425-450F. Since the same paragraph then says "simmer," one reasonable reading is a hot start to brown the floured surface, then a drop to about 325F for the long part of the cooking, though the recipe itself gives no second temperature.
- Plunging into boiling waterAn old habit meant to seal the surface and firm the flesh. It does not seal in juices, and it wets the meat you then have to dry. Modern practice gets the same browning from a dry surface, flour and a hot oven.
- Buttered paperParchment is the direct equivalent, buttered and pinned or tucked over the browned surface. Foil works but traps more steam and softens the crust.
- Brown flourPlain flour toasted in a dry pan until nut-coloured, kept in a jar. Browning reduces its thickening power, so you need noticeably more of it than raw flour, and it gives colour without the raw-paste taste.
- Irish potatoAn ordinary white potato — the Southern term distinguished it from sweet potato. Boiled, mashed smooth and whisked into the skimmed pan juices, it gives a pale, slightly opaque gravy.
- Times and temperatureVeal is indeed slower than lamb: figure 20-25 minutes per pound at 325F for a leg or shoulder, and cook to 145F internal with a 10-minute rest. Past 160F the meat tightens and the leanness shows.
- YieldA 4-5 lb bone-in shoulder or leg roast, which is the scale this method suits, serves six to eight with gravy.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housekeepers — hence "Mrs. S. T." at the foot of this one — and it reads like a collection of working household notes rather than a systematic manual. Veal appears often in such books because a dairy farm produced surplus bull calves, and the meat was a byproduct of keeping cows in milk rather than a luxury purchase. The technique is straightforwardly English in descent: flour dredge, pot liquor in the pan, a slice of salt pork to supply the fat the calf lacks, and buttered paper as a covering, a device that appears in British cookery writing well before the Civil War. The two gravies at the end are the interesting part — one brown, one white thickened with mashed potato — offered simply as alternatives.