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Roast Veal Stuffed
Select a shoulder of veal and have the bone removed; stuff with same stuffing used for Baked Fish, adding one cup chopped mushrooms. Sew up stuffed meat and roast same as Roast Veal.
A two-line recipe that leans on two other pages of the book, so the work is in filling the gaps: what the stuffing was, and how veal is roasted now.
- The cross-referenced stuffingThe Baked Fish stuffing is not reproduced here; stuffings of this type in period books are generally plain bread stuffings — soft crumbs, melted butter, salt, pepper and a little chopped herb, moistened with liquid — so check the Baked Fish page for the book's own proportions. A cup of chopped mushrooms, sauteed first to drive off their water, keeps the mixture from turning soggy inside the roast.
- Boning the shoulderAsk the butcher for a boned, untied veal shoulder; a whole one runs 4-6 lb after boning. Lay it flat, spread the stuffing to within an inch of the edges, roll with the grain, and sew or tie at 1½-inch intervals rather than relying on a single seam.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe defers to the book's Roast Veal directions, which are not reproduced here. In a modern oven, start at 425F for 20 minutes to colour the outside, then drop to 325F for the remainder.
- Doneness, not clock timePeriod cookbooks commonly gave veal something like 25-30 minutes per pound, which produces grey, dry meat. Roast to an internal temperature of 145F at the thickest point of the meat, checking the stuffing centre separately — it should reach 165F. That is roughly 20 minutes per pound at 325F, but the thermometer decides.
- Veal shoulder is leanShoulder has little fat cover, so it wants barding with a few strips of bacon or salt pork, or regular basting with butter and pan juices. Without it the outer half-inch dries well before the centre is done.
- Resting and carvingRest the roast 15-20 minutes before cutting the strings, or the stuffing will slump out of the slices. Carve across the roll in ¾-inch rounds.
- YieldA 5 lb boned shoulder with stuffing serves eight to ten, with the pan drippings deglazed into a light gravy.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, is a general household manual that happens to promote a chocolate maker, and its meat chapter is thoroughly conventional New England cooking of the era. A stuffed, rolled shoulder was one familiar way to make an awkward, bony cut carve neatly at table, and the technique — bone out, spread with bread stuffing, sew, roast — recalls, if only by analogy, British veal olives and the French epaule farcie. The cup of chopped mushrooms is the small extravagance that separates this from a plain roast; cultivated button mushrooms had become commercially available in America by the turn of the century and read as a genteel touch. The instruction to borrow the fish stuffing is typical of the book's economy: bread, butter and herbs served everything, and a cook was expected to page back rather than be told twice.