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Veal Stew
Two pounds of veal steak cut in strips; put in cold water in a skillet or spider and over the fire. The water should be just sufficient to cover the meat. Pare, wash and slice one small potato and put in with the meat. Stew for twenty or thirty minutes gently, taking care that the water does not boil away. Have ready two or three eggs boiled in the shell. When the meat is tender add to the broth one cup of fresh milk and one heaping tablespoon of flour wet with milk; season all with butter, salt and pepper, and, if you like, a little parsley. Cut the hard boiled eggs in slices and put into the broth. Let all boil up once, and serve with or without toast on the platter. A very nice breakfast dish.
A quick white stew rather than a long braise — the whole thing hinges on the meat being cut thin enough to be tender in half an hour. Cut it thick and no amount of extra simmering inside the stated time will help.
- SpiderA spider is a cast-iron skillet on three short legs, made to stand over coals. Any heavy, wide saucepan or deep skillet with a lid does the same job on a modern burner.
- Veal steak, cut in strips"Steak" here would most likely be leg, and the instruction is for thin strips rather than chunks. Cutting them thin, roughly half an inch across the grain, gives the best chance of tenderness within the twenty to thirty minutes.
- The single potatoOne small sliced potato in this quantity of broth will do more thickening than it does anything else; sliced thin it breaks down and gives the broth some body before the flour goes in. A starchy potato, sliced thinly, suits that purpose.
- Gentle stewingKeep the pot at a bare shiver. Veal toughens and shreds at a rolling boil, and the instruction about the water not boiling away is a warning that a wide simmer in a shallow pan will run it dry.
- Flour wet with milkA heaping tablespoon is somewhere around 10-15 g. Whisk it smooth with two or three tablespoons of the cold milk before adding, then stir it into the pot with the remaining cup so it does not lump.
- Let all boil up onceThe recipe asks for a single boil-up to set the sauce, and no longer: already-hard eggs toughen with further cooking and the milk risks catching on the bottom.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of veal with eggs and sauce feeds four generously, three as the substantial breakfast it was meant to be. Toast under it soaks up a thin sauce; skip it if your flour has done its work.
- SeasoningButter, salt and pepper go in at the end, off the heat if you like a glossier sauce. A tablespoon or two of butter is right for this quantity; the parsley is best chopped and added at the last moment.
Veal held a place in nineteenth-century American cookery that it has largely lost: it was cheap in dairy districts, where bull calves were surplus to a herd kept for milk, and its mild flavour and pale colour suited the delicate white stews and fricassees that a household considered fit for breakfast or an invalid tray. This dish is essentially a fricassee under a plainer name -- meat stewed in its own liquor, finished with milk and a flour thickening rather than browned first. Sliced hard-boiled eggs laid in at the end are a long-standing English garnish for pale sauced dishes, and they survived in American household books long after fashionable cooking had dropped them.