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Veal a la Creme
Take a piece of veal suitable for roasting, and put it in vinegar for twenty-four hours. Roast it with butter, pepper and salt, with a few slices of onion. Baste it well, and when it is finished crush the onions in the gravy and add some cream. Mix together with flour so as to thicken. This is the demi-glaze Sauce which is used for all brown Sauces. Take one pound of flour, dry it in the oven on a tray till it is the color of cocoa; pass it through a sieve into a saucepan, moisten it with stock, mixing very carefully. Boil it up two or three times during forty-eight hours, adding two carrots, two onions, thyme, bay, all cut up, which you have colored in the frying-pan, also some salt and peppercorns. When it is all cooked, pass it through a cloth or sieve. When it is reduced the first time, you should add some stock, but by the time it is finished it should be fairly thick. It will keep for a fortnight.
Two recipes are run together here: a vinegar-marinated veal roast finished with cream, and a large batch of brown flour sauce that the author calls demi-glaze. Read them as separate jobs.
- The marinadeTwenty-four hours in vinegar was both a tenderiser and a keeping measure in an unrefrigerated larder. Do it in a glass, stainless or ceramic dish in the refrigerator, and pat the meat dry before it meets butter or it will steam rather than brown.
- Roasting temperatureNo heat is given. A veal roast wants a moderate oven, 325F, until the centre reaches 145F, then a rest of ten minutes. A 3 lb boneless shoulder or loin may take anywhere from about 25 to 35 minutes per pound; go by the thermometer, not the clock.
- Finishing the gravyCrush the roasted onion slices into the pan juices, then add cream off direct heat and let it barely simmer. Acid from the marinade will be in those juices, and a hard boil can split the cream.
- "Mix together with flour"Probably a small beurre manie, or a spoonful of the browned flour from the second recipe, stirred in at the end rather than raw flour dumped into the pan. Whichever you use, give it two or three minutes of simmering to lose the pasty taste.
- The browned flourSpread the flour thin on a tray in a 350F oven and stir it every few minutes; it goes from pale tan to cocoa quickly and burns without warning. Browned flour has noticeably less thickening power than raw flour.
- Scale it downA pound of flour moistened with stock makes several quarts of sauce, far more than one roast needs. Two ounces of flour to a quart of good brown stock gives a workable amount; note that this is a flour-thickened espagnole, not the modern reduced demi-glace.
- Do not follow the keeping instructionsBoiling the pot up two or three times across forty-eight hours and then holding it a fortnight was standard in a cold stone larder and is a straightforward route to Clostridium perfringens today. Make the sauce in one session, cool it fast, and refrigerate three to four days or freeze it in portions.
- YieldA 3 lb roast with its cream gravy serves six.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in 1915 by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion. That origin explains the book's odd texture: the recipes were dictated from memory by cooks of very different backgrounds, so a homely veal roast can run straight into a professional kitchen's standing brown sauce with no break between them, and quantities are given as a cook remembers them rather than as a book would set them out. The flour-based brown sauce described here is the older French method; browning flour in the oven was how a nineteenth-century kitchen got colour and body in one operation, and a large batch kept in the cool larder saved the daily labour of starting over. "Demi-glaze" is simply an English spelling of demi-glace, half-glaze.