Home › Meats › Veal Stew, or Pot Pie, with Dumplings
Veal Stew, or Pot Pie, with Dumplings
The ends of the ribs, the neck and the knuckle may be utilized for a stew. Take three pounds of veal; two small onions; five potatoes; one tablespoon of butter; one cup of milk; salt and pepper. Cut the meat into pieces the size of a teacup, and place them in a kettle with the onion, salt and pepper and enough water just to cover them. Simmer gently until the meat is tender, about an hour being generally sufficient. Strips of salt pork are sometimes cooked in with the veal and add much to the flavor. Half an hour before serving add the potatoes, cut in halves, and boil them with the meat. Use for the dumplings; one pint of flour; one-half a large tablespoon of lard; one teaspoon of baking-powder; one teaspoon of salt; milk to moisten. Stir the baking-powder and salt into the flour, and rub in the lard with a spoon until the whole is thoroughly mixed. Add enough milk to moisten the flour, and make a dough, taking care not to make the mixture too wet. Flour the baking-board, roll the dough out an inch thick, and cut out as for biscuit. Put the pieces on a plate, set the plate in a steamer over the steam, and steam twenty minutes. When the dumplings are done, place them on a platter, and with a skimmer lift the meat and potato from the kettle and lay them on the platter. Add the milk and butter to the gravy in the kettle, and thicken with a little flour stirred to a thin, smooth paste with water. Pour the gravy over meat and dumplings. If the stew should seem quite boiled down, the dumplings should be steamed over a separate kettle of boiling water, as the rapid boiling necessary for their cooking reduces the stew very much. Another mode of cooking the dumplings is to boil them in with the stew; but they are very apt to be heavy unless served the moment they are done. Steamed dumplings can always be relied upon to be light.
A plain braise with steamed biscuit dumplings. The recipe's own closing paragraph carries its most useful instruction: steam the dumplings over their own pot of water rather than boiling them in the stew.
- The cutsRib ends, neck and knuckle are collagen-rich veal that a supermarket rarely sells cut up. Ask a butcher for bone-in veal shoulder or shank, cross-cut; boneless stew veal works but gives a thinner gravy.
- "Size of a teacup"Meaning large chunks, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 inches. Cutting smaller makes lean veal shred and dry out over the same cooking time.
- Simmer timeOne hour will do for shoulder; shank and neck need 1 1/2 to 2 hours before the connective tissue softens. Judge by a fork sliding out cleanly, not by the clock.
- One pint of flourTwo cups, about 8 1/2 to 9 oz. The single teaspoon of baking powder is light by modern practice, where a teaspoon per cup of flour is standard; the steaming does much of the lifting here, but 2 teaspoons gives a more familiar dumpling.
- Lard and milkHalf a "large" tablespoon is somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a modern tablespoon; butter or shortening substitutes directly. Milk to moisten runs roughly 2/3 cup for 2 cups of flour, added until the dough just holds.
- Steaming the dumplingsCut them an inch thick as directed and leave space on the plate, since they swell as they steam. Twenty minutes over hard-boiling water, keeping the steam in.
- Salt porkOptional in the original and worth including for flavor and fat, but taste before adding the salt called for in the meat pot.
- The gravyMilk plus a flour-and-water slurry gives a thin, pale sauce. Bring it back to a simmer for two or three minutes after thickening, or the raw flour will taste of paste.
- YieldThree pounds of bone-in veal with five potatoes and ten to twelve dumplings feeds five or six.
"Pot pie" here means what it long meant across much of the eastern United States: not a pastry-lidded dish but meat simmered in a pot with dough cooked on top of or beside it, a usage preserved in the Pennsylvania German bot boi of square noodles and broth. This is a recipe built to use the ends of the ribs, the neck and the knuckle after the chops and cutlets had been taken from the carcass. Veal was comparatively cheap and common in nineteenth-century American markets, a by-product of dairying, and cookbooks of the period devote long sections to stretching its least tender parts. The insistence on steamed rather than boiled dumplings reflects a real problem with the older method, where a slack dough dropped into a reducing stew absorbs liquid and turns dense.