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Neck Piece or Shoulder of Veal
Mrs. C. C. Stratton.
Put a piece of butter the size of an egg into a kettle ; put it on the stove; when it begins to fry, put in the veal, season it and let it fry until brown; then add water sufficient to cook it. When done take cream and flour well stirred, and thicken as for fricasseed chicken, and you have a nice dinner, very like chicken and much cheaper. Two pounds of veal will make a dinner for six or eight, providing it is not all bone.
A plain stovetop braise with a cream gravy, written for a cook who already knew how long veal takes. The gaps worth filling are the fat quantity, the liquid level, the cooking time, and how to keep the cream from breaking.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. In a wide heavy pot that is enough to brown two pounds of meat without scorching.
- KettleHere it means a deep, heavy-bottomed pot on the range, not a tea kettle and not an oven dish. A Dutch oven is the direct equivalent.
- Season itSalt and pepper, applied before browning. Mace, bay leaf or a little onion turn up in other period veal recipes and none of that contradicts this one, but the recipe itself specifies nothing.
- Water sufficient to cook itEnough to come about halfway up the meat, not to cover it. Covering it turns the browning to nothing and dilutes the gravy you are about to thicken.
- Until doneNeck and shoulder are working muscle with a good deal of connective tissue. Expect 1 1/2 to 2 hours at a bare simmer, covered, until the meat pulls easily from the bone.
- Thicken as for fricasseed chickenStir flour smoothly into cold cream first, then ladle a little of the hot broth into that mixture before returning it to the pot. Added straight to boiling liquid the cream is liable to curdle and the flour to lump. About 2 tablespoons flour to a cup of cream gives a gravy that coats a spoon.
- Do not boil after the cream goes inKeep it just below a simmer for the few minutes it takes the flour to lose its raw taste. This is the point where the dish is won or lost.
- YieldTwo pounds for six to eight assumes other dishes on the table alongside. Buy 3 to 3 1/2 pounds bone-in neck or shoulder if it is the centre of the meal for six.
Neck and shoulder were the cheap end of the calf, and this recipe is frank about why anyone would cook them: the result is "very like chicken and much cheaper." That comparison suggests something about nineteenth-century prices, when a stewing fowl was a respectable Sunday dinner and veal offcuts were the thrifty way to imitate one. The technique is a standard fricassee of the period, brown the meat, stew it in its own liquor, and finish with a flour-and-cream liaison, a method that runs through English and American cookbooks from the eighteenth century onward. Like much of The Home Cook Book, the entry is credited to a named contributor, Mrs. C. C. Stratton; the book was compiled from such donated receipts and sold to raise money, so the recipes read as one experienced housekeeper talking to another, with the obvious steps left out.