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Roasted Shoulder of Veal
Remove the knuckle from a shoulder of veal and roast the fillet, basting it often. When cooked place the veal on a hot dish, garnish it with slices of lemon, and serve with a sauceboatful of oyster sauce.
Oscar's instructions assume a butcher and a cook who already know what to do with a shoulder; the gaps are all in the numbers.
- What the cut isA whole veal shoulder runs 6-9 lb bone-in. "Remove the knuckle" means having the butcher take off the lower foreleg joint, leaving the thicker blade-and-arm portion; the knuckle itself is worth keeping for stock or braising.
- "The fillet" hereAlmost certainly not the tenderloin; in older butchery usage 'fillet' often meant simply the thick fleshy portion of the joint. The recipe gives no further instruction, so you may either roast the boned shoulder rolled and tied at 1-inch intervals, or leave it on the bone.
- Oven temperatureThe original names no heat at all. For a modern oven, start at 425F for 20 minutes to colour the outside, then drop to 325F for the remainder; veal shoulder is lean and full of connective tissue, so it wants a steady moderate heat.
- Time and donenessRoughly 20-25 minutes per pound at 325F. Pull at 145F internal for sliceable pink-blushed meat and rest 15 minutes; or push to 165-170F if you want the shoulder's collagen softened toward a carvable, falling-apart texture. The range between those two is where veal shoulder is at its worst.
- BastingVeal has almost no intramuscular fat, which is why "basting it often" is the one instruction in this recipe you should not skip. Lay a sheet of caul fat, bacon or a buttered cloth over the top, and baste every 20 minutes with pan drippings and a little stock.
- Oyster sauceThis is the old English white sauce — a butter-and-flour velouté loosened with the strained oyster liquor and cream, with the oysters slipped in off the heat. It is not bottled Chinese oyster sauce, which will taste entirely wrong here.
- Cooking the oystersAdd shucked oysters to the finished hot sauce and hold no more than 1-2 minutes, just until the edges ruffle. Longer than that and they turn to rubber.
- YieldA boned 5-6 lb shoulder serves 8-10. Carve across the grain in thin slices; the lemon is there to cut the richness of the sauce, and a wedge per plate does more good than the decorative rounds.
Oscar Tschirky's book collects the working repertoire of a large American hotel kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century, and the terseness here is the tell: these entries were written for cooks who already knew the method and needed only the combination. Veal shoulder was the economical end of a butcher's veal — cheaper than loin or the cutlets — and roasting it whole with a rich sauce was a standard way to make a modest cut carry a dining room. The pairing of veal with oyster sauce comes out of English practice, where oyster sauce accompanied boiled and roasted white meats and poultry through the nineteenth century; oysters were then abundant and cheap on both sides of the Atlantic, and their liquor supplied the saline depth that lean veal lacks. The lemon garnish is the period's usual signal for a delicate white meat, a convention also often seen beside veal cutlets and calf's head.