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Carrots and New Potatoes
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 or 7 persons. -3 or 4 lbs. of the loin or neck of veal, 15 young carrots, a few green onions, 1 pint of green peas, 12 new potatoes, 1 bunch of savoury herbs, pepper and salt to taste, 1 tablespoonful of lemon-juice, 2 tablespoonfuls of tomato sauce, 2 tablespoonfuls of mushroom ketchup. AVERAGE COST, 3s. 6d.
Dredge the meat with flour, and roast or bake it for about 3/4 hour it should acquire a nice brown colour. Put the meat into a stewpan with the carrots, onions, potatoes, herbs, pepper and salt; pour over it sufficient boiling water to cover it, and stew gently for 2 hours. Take out the meat and herbs, put it in a deep dish, skim off all the fat from the gravy, and flavour it with lemon-juice, tomato sauce and mushroom ketchup, in the above proportion. Have ready a pint of green peas boiled separately; put these with the meat, pour over it the gravy, and serve. The dish may be garnished with a few forcemeat balls. The meat, when preferred, may be cut into chops, and floured and fried, instead of being roasted; and any part of veal dressed in this way will be found extremely savoury and good.
TIME.-3 hours.
SEASONABLE, with peas, from June to August.
A summer stew of veal with the first carrots, potatoes and peas of the season, browned first and then simmered in its own broth. The recipe as printed opens mid-sentence with a fragment carried over from the previous entry ("and squeeze them nearly dry, then mash") — ignore it; the recipe proper begins at the ingredient list.
- Add the vegetables lateThis is the point that decides the dish. New potatoes and young carrots put in at the start and stewed two hours will collapse into the gravy. Brown the meat, start the stew with the onions and herbs, and add carrots at about 40 minutes from the end and new potatoes at about 25, judging by size.
- The initial browningThree-quarters of an hour in a hot oven is enough to colour a floured joint without cooking it through; the book gives no temperature. Browning the meat in fat in the stewpan itself gives the same result in a fraction of the time and keeps the fond.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom liquor, nothing like tomato ketchup — a Victorian staple sold in bottles and still available from British specialist grocers. Worcestershire sauce or a spoonful of soy plus a little mushroom soaking liquid stands in for its savour if you cannot find it.
- The cutLoin or neck of veal at 3-4 lb bone-in. Neck (scrag and best end) is the one to use for stewing; loin is a roasting cut and will dry. Rose veal shoulder or a boned-out neck fillet works well, and the recipe itself allows chops floured and fried instead.
- "A bunch of savoury herbs"Beeton's herb bundles are commonly parsley, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string, though she rarely spells out what goes in. It is lifted out with the meat before the sauce is finished.
- Peas cooked apartWorth keeping to. A pint of shelled peas — roughly 12 oz, or a similar weight of frozen — boiled separately for a few minutes and stirred in at the end stays green and sweet; stewed in the pot they turn grey.
- Finishing the gravySkimming the fat matters here, since veal throws a good deal. The lemon juice, tomato sauce and ketchup go in off the heat at the end; the liquid is deliberately left unthickened, so reduce it a little if you want more body.
- Forcemeat ballsThe optional garnish is small dumplings of minced veal or suet, breadcrumbs, herbs and egg, poached or fried. Omitting them costs the dish nothing.
- Yield and costSix to seven servings, as stated. The 3s. 6d. average cost is a period price note, not a modern guide.
Isabella Beeton's household book organised its cookery by season as much as by method, and this dish is a piece of that thinking: it carries the note "seasonable, with peas, from June to August". Young carrots, new potatoes and green peas all arrive together in an English June, and a Victorian cook with a kitchen garden or a good market would have had them in the same week. Veal was the natural meat to pair them with — mild, pale, associated with spring and early summer — and Beeton could quote a family dish at 3s. 6d. The finishing trio of lemon juice, tomato sauce and mushroom ketchup is characteristic of mid-nineteenth-century English cooking, which leaned on bottled store sauces to give depth to a broth; mushroom ketchup in particular predates tomato ketchup in Britain, the one dating from the early eighteenth century and the other reaching Britain in the early nineteenth, and was for a long time simply what "ketchup" meant.