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Veal Rolls
Take thin veal steak off the ham, and cut it in squares. Season these with salt and pepper and wrap around strips of salt pork, fastening each with a toothpick; roll in flour and brown in butter. Thicken the butter left in the pan with flour and add milk; bring this to a boil and pour over rolls. Place in the aluminum vessel, heat thoroughly for twenty minutes and place in the cooker for four hours. Mushrooms may be added to the sauce when ready to serve.
A fireless-cooker recipe: the food is brought to a hard boil on the stove, then sealed in an insulated box to finish on stored heat. Everything hinges on how much heat you put in before the lid goes down.
- "Off the ham"The ham here is the upper hind leg, so this is veal round or top round, sliced thin. Ask for veal cutlets or scaloppine about 1/4 inch thick, or pound thicker slices between plastic wrap.
- Salt porkUnsmoked cured pork belly or fatback, sold in slabs near the bacon. Cut it into pencil-thick strips; it bastes the lean veal from the inside. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon is the closest easy substitute, and pancetta works if you accept the seasoning it brings.
- The aluminum vesselFireless cookers came with fitted metal pails that dropped into an insulated well; the heat came from soapstone or metal discs heated on the range, while the well itself was packed with insulating material. Any heavy lidded pot that fits your chosen appliance stands in for it.
- Replacing the cookerTwenty minutes of hard heating plus four hours of retained heat has no exact modern equivalent; the nearest approximations are a low oven, around 275F, in a covered casserole for roughly 2 to 2 1/2 hours, or a slow cooker on low for 4 hours. The important part is that the veal and sauce reach a full boil on the stove first, exactly as written.
- Why not improvise the insulated boxA modern picnic cooler or towel-wrapped pot loses heat unpredictably, and meat sitting for hours between 40F and 140F is where trouble starts. Purpose-built fireless cookers retained heat far better than any kitchen substitute, but nothing here is temperature-controlled, so err on the side of a covered oven or slow cooker.
- The sauceBrown the rolls, then use roughly equal butter and flour to make the roux and about 1 1/2 cups milk for a pound and a half of veal. It should pour easily over the rolls, because long covered cooking thickens it further and the flour will tighten as it sits.
- ToothpicksCount them going in. Wooden picks survive four hours of moist heat and are easy to lose in the sauce; kitchen twine is safer if you are serving guests.
- MushroomsAdded at the end, as directed, so they keep some texture. Sauté sliced mushrooms separately in butter and stir them in with their juices just before serving rather than dropping them in raw.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 lb of veal makes 12 to 16 small rolls, enough for four with rice, noodles or mashed potato to take the sauce.
Fireless cookery had a genuine vogue in American households between roughly 1905 and 1920, and cookbooks of the period often gave it a section of its own. The cooker was an insulated chest holding one or more soapstone or metal discs heated on the range; food was boiled hard, dropped in, and left to finish on stored heat while the cook went out, which saved fuel in a coal or wood kitchen and kept the room cool in summer. The dish itself is the old veal roll, also sold as a veal bird or veal olive, in which a thin slice of lean leg meat is wrapped around fat and braised, the traditional answer to veal's problem of being tender but almost fatless.