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Knuckles of Veal
Veal (sliced) Salt, Pepper Mace, Thyme, Parsley Barley Flour, Butter Season with salt and pepper; flour lightly and fry brown. Lay in saucepan, cover with water; skim well; add seasonings. Simmer 2½ hours; thicken gravy with flour; add butter and salt to taste.
A shank braise written in the shorthand of a wedding-gift cookbook: an ingredient column, then a run of imperatives with no quantities at all. Everything you need to decide is in the cut and the liquid level.
- The cutA knuckle of veal is the shank, close to the cut sold today as osso buco. "Sliced" most likely means crosswise through the bone into rounds an inch and a half to two inches thick, though it could as easily mean meat cut off the bone; two to three pounds would serve four. Ask for the hind shank if there is a choice, and keep the marrow bone in — it is most of the body of the gravy.
- Barley, unmeasuredBarley, or barley flour? -- The list reads "Barley Flour, Butter," which may be a single ingredient — barley flour as the thickener — since the method never mentions barley again but does call for flour twice. If barley the grain is meant, half a cup of pearl barley added with the water is in keeping with the dish and will thicken it noticeably; more than that and you have soup.
- MaceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg, warmer and less sweet. Ground mace has faded from most spice racks but is still sold; a scant quarter teaspoon is plenty for a shank braise, and grated nutmeg at half that amount stands in acceptably.
- Cover with water, not drownLiquid just to the top of the meat. Veal shank gives up a great deal of gelatin, and a shallow braise reduces to something that coats a spoon while too much water leaves a thin broth that flour can only paste over.
- Skim wellThis is the instruction that decides whether the gravy is clean or muddy. Bring to a bare simmer uncovered and lift the grey scum off for the first ten minutes before the seasonings go in; once the pot boils, that scum breaks up and stays in the sauce.
- Two and a half hours is honestThe timing is not overlong. Shank needs that much time at 180–190F for the connective tissue to turn to gelatin; the meat should be pulling from the bone but not shredded.
- Thickening at the end"Thicken gravy with flour" means a slurry or a beurre manié, not raw flour tipped in. Work equal weights of soft butter and flour together — about a tablespoon of each per cup of liquid — and whisk it in off the boil, then simmer two or three minutes to cook out the paste taste.
- ServingParsley in the list is doing double duty; hold half of it back and add it chopped at the end for the colour the long simmer destroys. Rice, noodles or boiled potatoes take the gravy.
The cut itself was thrift. Veal knuckle was among the cheapest butcher's meat available, valued precisely because the bone and cartilage yielded the gelatin that made stock set and gravies cling — the same property that put calf's foot and knuckle at the base of nineteenth-century jellies and consomm hyme with veal is an old English pairing, carried into American household books through the Victorian era, and the barley marks the dish as belonging to the plainer, more frugal end of the meat chapter rather than to company cooking.