Roast Veal
Six pounds of veal taken from the leg, from the loin, or from the breast.
Skewer meat into shape; dredge with flour, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cover top with slices of salt pork. Allow twenty minutes to the pound, bake in a hot oven, and baste every ten minutes with fat from the pan. there is not sufficient fat in the pan, try out some pork on top of the stove and use that for basting.
If Remove pork slices from top of meat one half hour before it is done, and brown. A gravy may be made from the fat in the pan, same as Brown Gravy.
A plain barded roast of the sort that assumes a lean, milk-fed leg and a cook standing by the oven. The timing is the part to ignore; everything else still works.
- The hinge: use a thermometer, not the clockTwenty minutes to the pound in a hot oven means two hours for a 6-pound roast, which will leave it grey and dry. Roast to an internal temperature of 145-150F at the thickest part and rest 15 minutes; a boneless leg or loin of that size will usually get there in 1½ hours or less.
- "A hot oven"In books of this period this generally corresponds to something in the region of 400-450F. For a roast this large, start hot for 20 minutes to set the flour crust, then drop to 325-350F for the remainder.
- Salt pork on topThis is barding, and it is doing real work: veal has almost no intramuscular fat. Thin-sliced unsmoked salt pork or fatback is best; blanch it briefly if very salty, and season the meat lightly since the pork adds its own salt. Sliced bacon substitutes but brings smoke.
- "Try out some pork"Rendering. Dice salt pork and cook it in a skillet over medium heat until the fat runs clear, then use that liquid fat for basting. Butter or a neutral oil will do the same job.
- Skewering into shapeButcher's twine at 1½-inch intervals is easier than skewers and gives an even cylinder that cooks uniformly. Breast of veal is bony and awkward; ask for it boned and rolled if you want it to behave like the leg.
- Basting every ten minutesOptional in a modern sealed oven, where it mostly costs you heat each time the door opens. Every 25-30 minutes is enough, and the basting matters more once the pork comes off.
- Basting fatThe printed page was checked; the wording about the pan fat is as our text now gives it. In practice, if the pan yields too little fat, try out a few slices of salt pork on the stove and baste with that instead.
- Gravy and yieldPour off the pan fat, whisk a tablespoon or two of flour into an equal amount of the fat, then add stock or the pan juices with water and simmer until it coats a spoon. Six pounds of veal serves 8-10.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that published it partly to promote its cocoa; the meat chapters are conventional New England household cookery of the period, unbranded and unfussy. Veal was far more ordinary on American tables then than now, a by-product of the dairy trade that arrived at butchers cheaply and young, and its leanness is often said to be why veal roasts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are so commonly wrapped, larded, or covered in salt pork before they go to the oven. The long roasting times in books of this era are generally traced to both a taste for thoroughly cooked meat and the reality of coal and wood ranges whose temperatures were judged by hand and habit rather than a dial.