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Stuffed Breast of Veal
4 pounds breast of veal
1 teaspoon sweet marjoram
1 cup bread-crums
1 teaspoon thyme
2 slices fat salt pork
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
The butcher will prepare the veal for stuffing, if requested to do So. If he has not done so, make an incision between the ribs and the meat, to form a cavity. Fill this cavity with stuffing made from the bread-crums, pork, sweet marjoram, thyme, salt and pepper. Roast, following directions for roast veal.
A pocket-stuffed breast of veal is one of the great cheap cuts, but the original assumes you have already read the book's roast veal directions and that your butcher knows what a stuffing pocket is. Both need filling in.
- The hinge: low and slowBreast is a hard-working cut full of connective tissue, and it will be leathery at the 145F the USDA sets for whole veal cuts. Cook it well past that, to about 190F internally, so the collagen breaks down. That means roughly 3 to 3½ hours at 325F, covered for most of it, uncovered at the end to brown.
- "Directions for roast veal"Those directions sit elsewhere in the book and are not reproduced here; check them before starting. A hot start to set the surface followed by a moderate oven was a common period pattern, with basting every 20 to 30 minutes. Veal breast has little internal fat and dries out fast without basting or a lidded pan with a cup of stock in the bottom.
- Making the pocketIf the butcher has not done it, run a thin boning knife between the rib bones and the meat on the thicker end and work it back to form a cavity, keeping the opening small. Close it with metal skewers laced with kitchen twine, or sew it shut. An unsecured pocket dumps its stuffing into the pan.
- Bread-crumsThis most likely means crumbs from stale bread rather than the sandy commercial kind, though period books used both dry and soft crumb. One cup for a 4-pound breast is a modest amount of stuffing; if you want the pocket full, use two.
- Fat salt porkTwo slices of salt pork is the fat and much of the salt in the stuffing. Chop it very fine or render it gently and mix the fat and cracklings into the crumbs. Modern salt pork is often saltier than the recipe assumes, so taste before adding the full teaspoon of salt.
- Moisture in the stuffingAs written the stuffing is dry crumbs, fat and herbs with nothing to bind it. Add an egg and a few tablespoons of stock or milk, or it will roast to gravel inside the meat.
- HerbsA teaspoon each of dried marjoram and thyme is right for dried leaf herb. If using fresh, treble the quantity. Sweet marjoram is the ordinary marjoram of the spice rack, not oregano, which is coarser and will dominate.
- Yield and carvingFour pounds bone-in serves four to five. Let it rest 15 minutes, then carve down between the rib bones so each portion takes a slice of meat with its band of stuffing.
Breast of veal was for a long time the cut a thrifty household bought when it wanted roast veal without paying for the loin: a thin, bony, gelatinous slab that repays stuffing and long cooking and is nearly useless treated any other way. The pocket-stuffing technique is old and widespread, familiar in German and Austrian kitchens as gefüllte Kalbsbrust and in Jewish American cooking as stuffed veal breast, and it survives in American books of this period mainly as a way of stretching four pounds of a cheap cut across a family table. That Butterick, a pattern and fashion publisher, was issuing a recipe and household book at all says something about the era's middle-class housekeeping market; the entry's brevity, and its assumption that the butcher will cut the pocket for you, says the rest. Veal itself was abundant and inexpensive in the dairy regions, being the by-product of keeping cows in milk.