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Blanket of Veal
This dish may be prepared, if desired, from a mixture of cooked and uncooked veal. Discard all gristle and hard portions of any roasted veal. Cut in inch squares. To one cup of such meat allow three-quarters of a pound of uncooked breast of veal. Cover the raw meat with hot-not boiling -water. Add any bones from the roast, and two tablespoonfuls of any flavoring vegetables at hand (such as carrots, celery, and turnips, chopped), a sprig of parsley, one bay leaf, one teaspoonful of salt, and one-quarter teaspoonful of pepper. Cover and cook slowly until veal is nearly tender, then add the cold meat, and simmer gently ten minutes longer. Take out the meat and strain the broth.
There should be two cups; if not, make up with boiling water. Melt two tablespoonfuls of butter, stir in two tablespoonfuls of flour, and add the hot broth. When thickened, add one egg yolk beaten up with four tablespoonfuls of cream or rich milk.
Remove from the fire at once, add one tablespoonful of lemon-juice, and pour over the hot meat.. One cup of cooked peas may be added to the sauce if desired. This dish is often called Veau à la Blanquette.
A blanquette built around leftover roast veal, stretched with a piece of raw breast to make the broth worth having. The whole thing turns on the egg-yolk liaison at the end.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the yolk and cream go in, the sauce must not boil or it will curdle into threads. Temper the yolk with a ladle of the hot sauce first, stir it back off the heat, and let residual warmth do the thickening.
- "Hot — not boiling — water"Starting the raw breast in hot rather than boiling water is the gentler treatment, and the recipe follows it with an instruction to cook slowly. Hold the pot at a bare shiver rather than letting it come to a rolling boil.
- Breast of vealVeal breast is one of the traditional blanquette cuts, gelatinous and cheap. Many supermarkets no longer stock it; veal shoulder or boneless shank will serve, though you lose some body in the broth. Allow a good hour or more to reach "nearly tender."
- Ten minutes for the cooked meatThe already-roasted veal only needs warming through. Longer and the inch squares turn dry and stringy — the reason the recipe holds them back until the end.
- Lemon juice lastAcid stirred into a yolk-thickened sauce while it is still over heat risks breaking it. Off the fire, as the recipe directs, it sharpens what is otherwise a very mild dish.
- The broth measurementTwo cups of strained broth against two tablespoons each of butter and flour gives a pouring sauce, not a coating one. If you want it thicker, reduce the broth before making the roux rather than adding flour.
- YieldThree or four servings, depending on how much meat the breast gives up. Boiled rice or plain potatoes take up the sauce.
Blanquette comes from the French blanc, white: the meat is never browned, the sauce is never coloured, and the finish is a liaison of egg yolk and cream, one of the oldest thickeners in French cookery and the same technique behind a fricassée. "Blanket of Veal" is an anglicised name for the dish, often said to be a folk-etymological reshaping of blanquette; the final line here simply notes the alternative French name. Its appearance in a book of left-overs is telling: the classic version uses raw veal throughout, and the author's compromise — one cup of yesterday's roast propped up by three-quarters of a pound of fresh breast — is a domestic economy adaptation, using the fresh meat and the roast bones purely to generate a broth good enough to carry the reheated scraps.