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Veal with Onions
Take a lump of butter the size of an egg, and let it color in a saucepan. Slice some onions and fry them in another pan. When fried, add them to the butter with some sliced carrots, a few small onions, and your pieces of veal, salt, and pepper. Add a small quantity of water, and close the lid on the saucepan. When the meat is tender, you can thicken the sauce with a little flour. This is a good way to use veal that is hard, or parts that are not the best cuts.
A plain braise of the sort written for cooks who already knew what they were doing. The original gives no quantities for the meat and no cooking time, so the numbers below fill the gaps.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. "Let it color" means take it to a nut-brown, not black; butter solids burn quickly, so keep the heat moderate or add a spoonful of neutral oil to raise the smoke point.
- QuantitiesRoughly 2 lb of veal cut in 1.5-inch pieces, 2 sliced yellow onions, 3 carrots, and 8-12 small pickling or pearl onions. That serves four.
- The cutThe last line is the point of the dish: shoulder, neck, breast or shank. These are collagen-rich and need long, wet, gentle cooking. Loin or cutlet will go dry and stringy here.
- "A small quantity of water"A braise, not a stew. An inch or so in the pan, enough to keep things from catching; the onions and meat will give up plenty more liquid under the lid. Stock will taste better than water if you have it.
- Time and heatNinety minutes to two hours at the barest simmer. The original is a lidded saucepan on the stove; if you would rather use an oven, a modern equivalent is covered at around 325F. The meat is done when a fork turns in it with no resistance, not merely when it is cooked through.
- Keeping the small onions wholeAdd them for the last 30-40 minutes. Given the full two hours they collapse into the sauce, which is fine for flavor but leaves you without whole onions in the finished dish.
- ThickeningDo not scatter dry flour into the finished pot. Work a tablespoon of flour into an equal amount of soft butter and whisk that in off the boil, then simmer two or three minutes to cook out the raw taste.
- ServingBoiled potatoes suit it. A little chopped parsley and a squeeze of lemon at the end will lift what is otherwise a very mild, pale dish, though neither is in the original.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in 1915 from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and it was published to raise money for relief work. That origin shows in a recipe like this one, which ends by explaining that the method exists to rescue tough veal and second-rate cuts. What is striking is how little the recipe explains: no weights, no times, no oven. It reads as something set down by a home cook for other home cooks, on the assumption that the reader had made the dish before.