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Veal with Tomato Sauce
3 lb. Veal Salt 1 C bread crumbs 2 C tomato sauce Cut veal into pieces about 2 inches square. Roll in bread crumbs and brown in hot fat. Put in baking dish with sauce and bake 2 hours, keeping dish covered till last half hour. Tomato sauce:- 1 can tomato soup ¼t ground cloves 1 T sugar Mrs. Fern Gover.
A church-supper braise that leans on canned soup, typical of the mid-century Midwest. The original gives no oven temperature and a couple of garbled measurements, so a few decisions have to be made before you start.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A covered braise of this kind wants 325F; 350F is fine if you check the liquid. Two hours at that heat will take the veal well past sliceable and into fork-tender, which is the intent.
- "14t ground cloves"Almost certainly a garbled 1/4 teaspoon. Ground cloves are aggressive, and a quarter teaspoon is already assertive against two cups of sauce. Do not read this as 1 to 4 teaspoons.
- The can of soupA can of condensed tomato soup is about 10.5 oz, which is closer to 1 1/4 cups than the 2 cups the ingredient list calls for. Dilute with water, stock or canned tomato to reach 2 cups; undiluted condensed soup risks scorching over a two-hour bake.
- Which cut of vealShoulder or breast, boneless, is what stands up to two hours. Veal cutlet or loin cut into squares will be dry and stringy long before the time is up. Buy stew veal and cut it yourself into 2-inch pieces.
- BrowningCrumbs on raw meat will not stick reliably. Salt the veal, let it sit ten minutes, pat dry, then press the crumbs on and brown in a shallow layer of hot fat in batches. Crowding the pan steams the coating off.
- Keeping it coveredThe cover is doing the work here; the last half hour uncovered is only to thicken the sauce and re-crisp the top. If the sauce is already tight at 90 minutes, add a splash of water rather than leaving it uncovered longer.
- SaltCondensed soup is heavily salted. Season the veal itself lightly and taste the sauce before adding any more.
- YieldThree pounds of boneless veal serves six to eight as a luncheon dish, more if it goes over noodles or rice.
Dishes built on a can of something fill twentieth-century community cookbooks, and tomato soup was among the most versatile of them: a ready-made sauce base with sugar, salt and thickener already in it. The sweetening and the clove here recall nineteenth-century American tomato cookery, which often treated the tomato as something closer to a fruit and paired it with warm spice. Veal was mild and pale and was widely thought more refined than beef, and shoulder cut into squares was cheap enough to feed a crowd. The attribution to Mrs. Fern Gover follows the usual convention of such collections, where entries carry the name of the woman who vouched for them.