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Browned Veal Knuckle
Purchase a meaty veal knuckle. Cover it with boiling water, add ½ teaspoonful of salt, a small white onion stuck with 2 cloves and 12 peppercorns and simmer slowly until very tender. Transfer to a dripping pan, cover the top with very thin slices of larding pork and brown in a quick oven. This will take nearly an hour.
Make a gravy with the pot liquor, using browned flour to give it color.
A two-stage treatment of a cheap cut: a long gentle simmer to break down connective tissue, then a hot oven to brown the outside. The hinge is the simmer — the knuckle has to be genuinely fork-tender before it goes near the oven, because the hour of browning will not tenderize anything.
- The cutA veal knuckle is the shank end — the lower leg with the joint, heavy in bone and gelatin. Ask a butcher for a whole veal shank or cross-cut osso buco pieces; the recipe gives no weight, and how many it feeds depends entirely on how meaty the knuckle is.
- Simmer time"Until very tender" means roughly 2 to 3 hours at a bare shiver, never a rolling boil. The meat should pull from the bone with light pressure before you drain it.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. The meat is already cooked; the oven is only there to render the pork fat and colour the surface. Watch it rather than trusting the full hour — a smaller knuckle may be done well short of it.
- Larding porkFresh pork fatback or unsmoked salt pork, sliced almost transparent. If using salt pork, blanch the slices a minute in water first or the finished dish will be aggressively salty, especially alongside a reduced pot liquor.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a skillet or on a sheet pan until the colour of dry sand. It contributes colour and a nutty note but thickens noticeably less than raw flour, so allow more of it than you would untoasted and judge the gravy as it comes together.
- The pot liquorSkim the fat and taste before thickening. Veal shank broth is gelatinous but mild; reducing it by a third concentrates it and gives the gravy body the flour cannot supply. Discard the boiled onion and strain out the peppercorns.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon in the whole pot is seasoning for the broth, not for the meat. Season the finished gravy properly at the end.
Veal knuckle earned its place in a low-cost cookery book because it is mostly bone and sinew — the parts a butcher could barely sell — yet those are exactly the parts that dissolve into gelatin and make a broth with real body. The two-step method here, poach then roast hot, is a familiar way of making a tough cut look like a joint of meat: the household gets a stock, a gravy and a browned centrepiece from a single cheap purchase. Larding, the practice of covering or threading lean meat with pork fat, was routine, and dripping pans and browned flour were both ordinary equipment — browned flour was sometimes prepared in quantity and kept in a jar, ready to colour gravies.