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Braised Knuckle of Veal
Lard well a knuckle of veal weighing about three pounds; braise it in a pan with one ounce of fresh salt pork, one tablespoonful of salt and one teaspoonful of pepper. Cook for fifteen minutes, stirring now and then, and moistening with one-half pint each of Spanish sauce and white broth. Add one pint of raw jardiniere and one breakfast cupful of flageolets. Cook all together for forty-five minutes. Transfer the knuckle to a hot dish, pour the garnishing over, and serve very hot.
Baked Leg of Veal with Cream Sauce Place a small leg of veal in rather a deep baking dish; melt a lump of butter, pour it over the veal and roast it in a slack oven. Turn the meat now and then and baste it well. When nearly cooked sprinkle over with a little flour and salt, pour over it one-half pint of cream and finish cooking, basting from time to time and keeping the oven slack. When done drain the leg, place it on a hot dish and arrange a truffle round the knuckle-bone. Pour the cream into a small saucepan, mix a small quantity of melted glaze with it and boil until slightly reduced. Add two or three drops of vinegar, then pour the same over the meat, and serve.
Two recipes have run together here: the braised knuckle, and a baked leg of veal with cream sauce that begins mid-paragraph at "Baked Leg of Veal." Read them as separate dishes.
- The timing will not work as writtenA veal knuckle is shank — collagen-heavy meat that needs two to three hours of gentle liquid cooking to become tender. The recipe allows only an hour in total (fifteen minutes plus forty-five), which will not get there. Plan on a long, low braise at a bare simmer, covered, until the meat pulls from the bone.
- "Lard well"This means threading strips of pork fat through the meat with a larding needle, not smearing it with lard. Modern veal is lean enough that the same effect comes from barding — tying a sheet of fatback or a few strips of unsmoked bacon over the top.
- Spanish sauceSauce espagnole: the classic brown mother sauce of roux, brown veal stock, mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours. A half pint is one cup. A well-reduced brown veal stock thickened lightly with beurre manié stands in acceptably.
- Jardinière and flageoletsJardinière is a mix of vegetables cut in short batons — carrot, turnip, green beans, peas were standard. Flageolets are small pale-green immature kidney beans, sold dried; soak and cook them separately until nearly done before they go into the braise, or they will still be chalky. Canned flageolets need only warming through.
- Kitchen measuresA breakfast cupful is roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so treat it as a generous cup. "White broth" is unbrowned veal or chicken stock. One tablespoon of salt for three pounds of meat plus a pint of sauce is heavy-handed by current taste; salt in stages.
- A slack ovenIn the second recipe this means a cool oven, conventionally somewhere around 250-300F, though period usage varied. It matters: cream held above a slow simmer in the pan will break and scorch. Baste often and keep the heat low.
- GlazeGlace de viande — brown stock reduced to a syrup. A teaspoon of it enriches the cream sauce; a commercial demi-glace concentrate does the same job.
- YieldA three-pound knuckle with beans and vegetables serves four, and the braising liquid is the sauce — no separate reduction is called for.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and his 1896 cook book was written for cooks who already knew the French repertoire: it names sauce espagnole and jardiniere without explanation. The dish itself is the hotel version of a very old European way with veal shank — the same cut Milan turns into osso buco — where the gelatin in the knuckle thickens the braise and the marrow is part of the reward. The flageolet was a comparatively recent French bean, developed in the second half of the nineteenth century and prized for staying pale and holding its shape, and its pairing with veal and a brown sauce is a Parisian touch. The run-on text, where the second recipe's title disappears into the paragraph, is a defect of the text as it has come down to us rather than anything to read the dishes together by.