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Blanquette of Veal with Peas
Prepared the same as for Blanquette of Veal, adding one pint of cooked green or canned blanched peas two minutes before serving.
This is a one-line variation that assumes you have the parent recipe for blanquette of veal in front of you; everything that matters is in the base preparation, and the peas are a garnish added at the last moment.
- What a blanquette isA white veal stew: the meat is never browned, and the cooking liquid is finished with a roux and a liaison of egg yolk and cream. Keeping the pan pale is the whole point, so use a heavy stainless or enamelled pot rather than bare cast iron.
- The hingeOnce the egg-and-cream liaison goes in, the sauce must not boil. Hold it below a simmer, around 180F, or the yolks curdle and the velvety sauce turns grainy. Add the peas off a hard boil for the same reason.
- A pint of peasTwo cups, roughly 10-12 oz. Frozen peas are the modern equivalent of the "canned blanched" ones and are better; they need only the two minutes the recipe allows, warmed through in the sauce.
- Why two minutesPeas held in a hot sauce for longer than they need tend to dull in colour and go mealy. Since the recipe's peas are already cooked or canned, the late addition is about colour and texture rather than cooking, so treat the two minutes as a limit.
- Cut of vealShoulder or breast, boned and cut in 1 1/2-inch pieces. Both are collagen-rich and need 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours of gentle simmering; leg or cutlet will go stringy long before it is tender.
- Starting whiteIf the base recipe calls for blanching the meat, do it: cover the veal with cold water, bring it just to the boil, drain and rinse. That removes the scum that would otherwise cloud a sauce meant to look like cream.
- YieldA blanquette built on 3 lb of boneless veal with a pint of peas serves six. Serve with plain rice or buttered noodles.
Blanquette comes from the French blanc, white, and names a whole family of ragouts defined by what they are not: nothing is browned, no dark stock is used, and the sauce is finished pale with egg yolk and cream. Veal was the classic candidate because its mild flavour and gelatinous shoulder suit a long, quiet simmer. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maitre d'hotel, worked from the French repertoire that governed American hotel dining at the turn of the century, and his 1896 book is full of these terse cross-referenced variations. A single base preparation could be listed a dozen ways on a menu by changing the garnish -- with peas, with mushrooms, with small onions -- which is less a matter of invention than of how a large hotel kitchen kept a long carte running from a short list of mother preparations.