Home › The Belgian Kitchen › Veal with Tomatoes
Veal with Tomatoes
Grill some slices of fat veal; cook some sliced tomatoes with butter, pepper and salt, on a flat dish in a pretty quick oven. Garnish the veal with the tomatoes laid on top of each slice, and pour maitre-d'hotel butter over, made with butter, salt, chopped parsley, and lemon-juice.
Three components, no quantities, and no timings — the original assumes a cook who knows what grilled veal and maître d'hôtel butter should look like. The points below fill in what the text leaves out.
- "Fat veal"This means a cut with some marbling or a fat edge — loin or rib chops, or thick shoulder steaks — not the pale, lean scallopini sold as veal cutlets today. Very lean slices will dry out under a grill in minutes; ask for chops cut about 3/4 inch thick.
- Grill means broilIn British and Belgian usage of the period, to grill is to cook by direct radiant heat, over a gridiron or under a top heat. A modern overhead broiler, a ridged grill pan, or a charcoal grill all work. Veal is cooked to 145F internal with a short rest.
- "A pretty quick oven"Roughly 400–425F. The tomatoes are meant to collapse and concentrate rather than stew, so use a shallow dish in a single layer and give them 20–30 minutes depending on thickness.
- Choosing the tomatoesThick slices from firm, ripe fruit hold together on top of the meat; watery out-of-season tomatoes will flood the dish. Halved plum tomatoes, cut side up, are the reliable substitute.
- Maître d'hôtel butterSoftened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice and salt — a standard ratio is 4 tablespoons butter to 1 tablespoon parsley and 2 teaspoons lemon juice. The instruction to "pour" it means melting the compound butter just to the point of softness; if you take it to a full boil it splits and loses the fresh lemon note.
- Order of workStart the tomatoes first, since they take considerably longer than the veal. The meat should go under the heat only when the tomatoes are nearly done.
- YieldFigure one chop and one large tomato per person; the butter quantity above dresses four servings.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in 1915 from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and its plainness is part of the record — these are dishes recalled from memory, without weights, by people cooking in other people's kitchens. The dish itself is thoroughly French in construction: beurre maître d'hôtel, butter worked with parsley and lemon, was a standard finish for grilled meat and fish in nineteenth-century French and Belgian cooking.