Veal Roll
Remove the bone from a shoulder of veal, brush with melted butter, and stuff with sautéd mushrooms or sweetbreads. Cover bone broken in pieces with cold water; add one fourth cup each of carrot and onion, a bit of bay leaf, sprig of parsley, four cloves, and six peppercorns. Add stuffed and rolled veal, and simmer until tender. Cover with slices of bacon; bake in a hot oven, basting often. Serve with Olive Sauce.
A boned, stuffed shoulder braised in its own bone stock, then finished uncovered under bacon. The book assumes you know both stages and gives no times; here are the numbers.
- The hinge: two cooking stages, not oneThe veal simmers in the bone broth until tender, then comes out and goes into the oven to brown. If you skip the simmer and roast a rolled shoulder outright, the outside dries long before the centre of the roll is done.
- "A hot oven"Period books put a hot oven at roughly 400–450F. It is used only for the browning and basting at the end, perhaps 20–30 minutes; the meat is already cooked through by then.
- Simmering timeA 4–5 lb boned shoulder, rolled and tied, needs about 2 to 2½ hours at a bare simmer — barely trembling water, never a boil, or the outer layers shred. Test with a skewer at the thickest part of the roll.
- Ask the butcherA whole boned veal shoulder is a special order in most places today. Request it boned and butterflied flat, and ask for the bones cut up for the broth; a saw or cleaver at the shop is easier than trying to break them up at home.
- SweetbreadsIf you use them rather than mushrooms, soak in several changes of cold water for a few hours, blanch briefly, cool, then peel off the membrane and slice before sautéing. Unprepared sweetbreads are unpleasantly bloody and firm.
- Tying the rollButterfly the shoulder to an even thickness, spread the filling short of the edges, roll with the grain and tie at 1-inch intervals with butcher's twine. Untied, it opens in the pot and the stuffing escapes into the broth.
- BaconBacon of the period was often fattier and more heavily salted than today's. Use thin unsmoked or lightly smoked slices laid over the top and secured with twine or toothpicks; heavily smoked supermarket bacon will dominate the veal.
- The brothStrain and reduce the cooking liquid; it makes a good basting liquid and can be used to enrich the Olive Sauce. There is no reason to discard it.
- YieldA shoulder of this size serves 8 to 10 as an entrée. Rest the roll 15 minutes before cutting the twine, then slice across into rounds so each shows the spiral of stuffing.
Veal Roll belongs to the family of boned, stuffed and rolled joints that European kitchens have long made — the French ballotine is the same idea. A shoulder was a cheaper cut than the loin or cutlets, and boning it turned an awkward joint into something that could be carved into neat rounds. Its appearance in the entrée section of a Lowney's book is a reminder that these volumes, though published to promote a chocolate company, were compiled as full household cookbooks: Maria Willett Howard's Lowney's Cook Book (1907) follows the Boston Cooking School style of the day, with its brief telegraphic method and its cross-references to sauces given elsewhere in the volume. The olive sauce it calls for reflects an American fondness for olives around the turn of the century, when they were still largely an imported good.