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Pope's Nose of Veal
Ask the butcher for those precious jewels of meat which lie on either side of the calf's tail. Braise them with a few soaked apricots, fat raisins and prunes in an iron pot, skillet or Dutch oven.
The instruction is barely more than a sketch: two small muscles, dried fruit, a heavy pot. Everything a braise normally specifies — liquid, heat, time, seasoning — is left to the cook, so the notes below fill in the working details.
- Finding the cutThese are the small, tender ovals of muscle lying either side of the tailbone at the top of the rump, the veal equivalent of the "oysters" on a chicken. A butcher cutting whole carcasses can set them aside; otherwise substitute veal cheeks or a piece of boned veal shank cut into 2-inch chunks, both of which braise the same way.
- Quantity and yieldA pair of these from one calf is small, likely no more than a few ounces: a taste rather than a dinner. As a working guide only, reckon 5-6 oz of meat per serving and scale the fruit at roughly 2 oz dried fruit per pound of meat; the recipe itself says only 'a few'.
- The liquid the recipe omitsA braise needs something to braise in. Use veal or chicken stock, or stock and dry white wine, poured to come no more than halfway up the meat; the fruit will release more moisture as it softens.
- Brown firstSeason the meat and sear it hard in the dry pot before anything else goes in. These muscles are small and lean, and the crust is the only source of deep flavour in a pot otherwise dominated by sweet fruit.
- Soaking the fruitCover the apricots, raisins and prunes in warm water or wine for 30 minutes; the recipe specifies them soaked. It puts them in with the meat from the start, but adding them for the last third of the cooking keeps them from collapsing to jam.
- Heat and timeThe recipe gives neither. In a modern oven, 300-325F, covered, until a skewer meets no resistance; pieces this small may be done well short of the two hours a larger braise would take. Over a fire, keep the pot at a bare shiver with coals raked underneath and a shovelful on the lid, checking the liquid every 30 minutes.
- Cutting the sweetnessDried fruit alone makes a cloying sauce. A spoonful of wine vinegar, a strip of lemon zest or a few black peppercorns in the pot keeps it savoury; finish by lifting the meat out and reducing the liquid to a glaze.
"Pope's nose" is most often the fatty triangle at the tail end of a roast fowl, and the name is generally traced to anti-Catholic joking in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, where the same morsel is also called the parson's nose. Applied here to veal, it borrows that vocabulary for the two small muscles tucked beside the calf's tail — the sort of overlooked scrap that whole-carcass butchery puts in front of a cook. Braising meat with dried apricots, raisins and prunes is much older than either name, and is generally connected to medieval European cookery and its debt to Persian and Arab practice; an iron Dutch oven set among coals does the slow, even work that a modern oven does now.