Roast Veal
The leg, cushion (thickest part of leg), and loin, are suitable pieces for roasting. When leg is to be used, it should be boned at market. Wipe meat, sprinkle with salt and pepper, stuff, and sew in shape. Place on rack in dripping-pan, dredge meat and bottom of pan with flour, and place around meat strips of fat salt pork. Bake three or four hours in moderate oven, basting every fifteen minutes with one-third cup butter melted in one-half cup boiling water, until used, then baste with fat in pan. Serve with brown gravy.
A boned, stuffed veal roast, barded with salt pork because veal has almost no fat of its own. The method is sound; only the timing and the temperature guidance need updating.
- Moderate ovenIn period usage this is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. A boned and rolled leg is dense, so an initial 20 minutes at 425F to set the surface, then down to 350F, gives better colour without changing the recipe's logic.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockThree to four hours suggests a large whole boned leg, perhaps 8-10 lb. Modern practice is to pull a veal roast at 145F on an instant-read thermometer and rest it 15-20 minutes; a 4-5 lb rolled roast will reach that in roughly 1½ to 2 hours. Veal cooked well past that turns dry and stringy.
- The stuffing is the hingeStuffing packed inside a rolled roast has to reach 165F, and by the time it does the meat around it is overcooked. Bake the stuffing separately in a dish moistened with pan juices, or use it and accept that the meat will be well done throughout.
- Why the salt porkVeal is exceptionally lean, and the pork strips are barding, not seasoning. Thin-sliced fatback, unsmoked bacon or caul fat all work; smoked bacon will dominate the flavour of the meat.
- The basting liquidOne-third cup butter melted in half a cup of boiling water gives a thinner liquid that spreads over the surface more readily than melted butter alone, though it will separate and wants stirring. Basting every fifteen minutes means opening the oven a dozen or more times, which costs heat; every 25-30 minutes is enough with a barded roast.
- Dredging the panFlour scattered on the bottom of the dripping-pan browns in the fat and becomes the thickener for the brown gravy at the end. Watch that it toasts rather than burns; if the pan runs dry, add a little more of the hot water.
- Boned at marketAsk a butcher to bone, roll and tie a leg or the cushion (the top round). Keep the bones for stock. "Sew in shape" can be done with butcher's twine at 1-inch intervals instead of a needle.
- YieldA boned 8 lb leg serves 12-14; a 4-5 lb cushion roast serves 8. Veal slices best after a full rest, cut thin across the grain.
Veal held a place in nineteenth-century American cookery that it has largely lost: dairy herds produced surplus bull calves, and the meat was mild and available in city markets in a way it is not now. Cookbooks of the period treat it at length, and the preparations tend to compensate for the same problem the barding solves here, that veal has neither fat nor strong flavour of its own. Hence the salt pork, the butter baste, the stuffing and the brown gravy, all of them supplying what the calf did not. The instruction to have the leg "boned at market" is a reminder of how much butchery was expected to happen at the counter, when a household cook ordered by the cut and the shop did the knife work.