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Stewed Fillet of Veal
Bone a fillet of veal, fill the cavity with veal stuffing, then lard the fillet and half roast it; then put it into a stewpan with two quarts of white stock, one teaspoonful of mushroom catsup, and one teaspoonful of lemon pickle. Let it simmer slowly until cooked. Strain the gravy, then thicken it with butter rolled in flour, add a few pickled mushrooms and a little salt and cayenne, and pour it over the boiling veal on the dish. Have in readiness two or three dozen forcemeat balls to put round and on top of it, place some slices of lemon round, and serve the dish.
A two-stage braise: the stuffed, larded joint is partly roasted for colour, then finished slowly in stock. The points below cover the cuts, the vanished condiments, and the timings that matter.
- "Fillet of veal" is not tenderloinIn this vocabulary the fillet is the boned upper leg — what a butcher now sells as top round or the whole leg roast, 4 to 6 lb. Ask for it boned and tied, and keep the bones for the stock.
- Half roast means colour, not donenessThe book gives no temperature or time; a hot oven just long enough to brown the exterior, then transfer to the stewpan. The braise does the actual cooking; roasting the joint through first will leave it dry after the long simmer.
- LardingThreading strips of chilled pork fatback through lean veal with a larding needle. Modern veal is leaner still, so the technique is not merely decorative. Barding — tying sheets of fatback or thin-sliced pork belly over the outside — gives most of the benefit without the needle.
- Mushroom catsupAn English ketchup that long predates the tomato kind: salted mushrooms pressed for their liquor and spiced, thin and dark, nothing like tomato ketchup. Specialist grocers and British importers still carry it. A teaspoon of good mushroom soy or a dash of Worcestershire covers the same savoury register.
- Lemon pickleA period condiment of lemons salted and steeped with spice, closer to Indian nimbu ka achar than to anything in a modern larder. A teaspoon of the brine from preserved lemons, or lemon juice with a scrape of the salted rind, is the nearest substitute.
- Butter rolled in flourBeurre manié — equal weights soft butter and flour kneaded together, then whisked into the strained, simmering gravy in small pieces. About 2 tablespoons of each will thicken a quart of reduced stock. It must simmer a few minutes afterwards to cook out the raw flour.
- Forcemeat ballsUsually the same sort of forcemeat as the cavity stuffing, rolled small and either fried or poached in a little of the stock. Two or three dozen sounds excessive only if they are imagined large; balls of this kind were commonly marble-sized.
- Doneness and timingA stuffed joint of this size needs roughly 2 to 2½ hours of bare simmering; the stuffing should reach 165F, which is the limiting figure since it contains raw ground meat. Keep the liquid at a shiver — a rolling boil will squeeze the veal tough.
- YieldA 5 lb stuffed joint with garnish serves 10 to 12. The recipe is written for platter service, the sauce poured over the joint on the dish before it goes out.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf dining rooms from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book is less an invention than a compilation — nine hundred-odd pages drawn from the hotel's kitchen and from the English and French household books that preceded it. This dish shows its parentage plainly: mushroom catsup, lemon pickle, forcemeat balls and butter rolled in flour are all fixtures of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery, the sort of formula Hannah Glasse and Eliza Acton would have recognised on sight. Veal appeared often on American hotel menus of the period, mild enough to carry a stuffing and a heavily seasoned gravy, and a boned, larded, garnished joint of it was the kind of centrepiece a large dining room could portion cleanly for a dozen covers.