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Stewed Veal
Put two tablespoonfuls of flour and two ounces of butter into a stewpan and stir over the fire until browned and well mixed; then put in the veal, cut into pieces, and fry a little. Put in some young onion, button mushrooms, peas, carrots, a bunch of thyme and some laurel leaves, with salt and pepper to taste, and moisten the whole with a little warm water. Boil the veal gently until cooked, then turn the stew onto a hot dish, and serve at once. Stewed Veal, Bourgeoise Cook in one ounce of warm butter three pounds of lean veal cut in pieces and six small onions. After cooking for ten minutes add two tablespoonfuls of flour and moisten with one quart of white broth. Stir well and season with one heaping tablespoonful of salt, one teaspoonful of pepper and one-half wineglassful of red wine. Add two or three carrots cut into small squares one ounce of salt pork cut up into pieces, and a garnished bouquet. Cook for forty minutes longer, remove the bouquet, and serve very hot.
Two versions of the same dish, printed back to back: a loose household stew and a more formal bourgeoise version with measured broth and wine. Neither gives a yield, and the first gives no quantity of meat at all.
- The hinge: keep the liquid at a bare simmerVeal shoulder tightens and turns stringy if the pot ever comes to a rolling boil. "Boil the veal gently" means the surface should barely tremble, lid ajar, for the whole cooking time.
- Laurel leaves and the garnished bouquetLaurel leaves are bay leaves; two is plenty for a quart of liquid. A "garnished bouquet" is a bouquet garni, thyme and parsley stems with a bay leaf tied in a leek leaf or with string so it can be lifted out whole.
- White brothA pale, unroasted stock, ideally veal, otherwise light chicken stock. The point is that nothing in the finished stew should be brown.
- Cut and timingForty minutes will not tenderise cubed veal shoulder or breast; count on 1 to 1.5 hours at a simmer, testing with a fork.
- Cut back the saltA heaping tablespoon of salt plus salt pork in a quart of broth is far too much by current practice. Use about a teaspoon at the start, and correct at the end after the liquid has reduced.
- The first version's proportionsNo meat weight is given. The flour and butter suggest a roux for roughly a pint of liquid, so about 2 lb of veal is a reasonable reading; add only enough warm water to come three-quarters up the meat, or the sauce will be thin.
- Vegetables go in latePeas, button mushrooms and young onions added at the start of a long simmer collapse. Brown the mushrooms separately and add them, the peas and the small onions in the last 15 minutes.
- YieldThe bourgeoise version, with 3 lb of veal, serves six generously with rice, buttered noodles or boiled potatoes.
Veal was a mainstay of the classic French kitchen, valued less for flavour than for the pale, gelatinous body it gave sauces and stocks. The label bourgeoise in nineteenth-century French cookery signalled a homely treatment rather than a grand one: meat cooked in one pot with its garnish of carrots, onions and salt pork, served in its own sauce rather than napped with a separately built veloute. Printing the plain household stew and the bourgeoise version together, as this book does, shows one basic method followed by a more formally composed version of the same dish.