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Blanquette of Veal
Cut a three-pound breast of white, tender veal in two-inch square pieces. Soak in cold water for one hour, drain and place in a saucepan with just sufficient water to cover the veal. Add one carrot cut in quarters and two white medium onions. Tie in a bunch one leek, two branches celery, two branches parsley, one branch chervil, a sprig thyme, one sprig sage, one bay leaf, two cloves, a bean of garlic, and add to the veal. Season with a heavy teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon white pepper, mix a little, cover pan and let gently boil forty-five minutes, being careful to skim off scum once in a while. Strain broth into a basin, remove carrots, onion and bunch of herbs from the veal. Mix in a saucepan a half ounce butter with one and a half ounces flour, and heat a minute, then pour in three-quarters of the veal broth and mix with wooden spoon until it comes to a boil. Dilute in a bowl two egg yolks with juice of half a lemon, half a gill milk and a saltspoon grated nutmeg and add to sauce, sharply mix with a whisk three minutes, then strain sauce through cheesecloth upon veal, gently toss, pour in a large, hot, deep dish and serve.
A classic white veal stew that lives or dies by its finishing liaison. The one thing to get right: once the egg yolks go in, the sauce must never boil again or it will curdle into grains.
- The liaisonTake the sauce off direct heat before whisking in the yolk, lemon, milk and nutmeg mixture, and keep it below a simmer (about 160-175F) for the three minutes of whisking. If it breaks, no amount of straining will bring it back.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of milk is 2 fluid ounces, or 1/4 cup (4 tablespoons). A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon. Half an ounce of butter is 1 tablespoon and 1 1/2 ounces of flour is about 1/3 cup, which gives a deliberately flour-heavy roux to carry the volume of broth.
- A bean of garlicOne clove, peeled and left whole. It goes into the herb bundle and is discarded with it, so the garlic reads as background rather than flavour.
- Cut and timingBone-in breast of veal at forty-five minutes will be cooked but still firm. Expect 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours of gentle simmering for meat that yields to a fork, or use boneless veal shoulder, which is easier to find and comes to tenderness in about an hour.
- Soaking and skimmingThe hour in cold water and the repeated skimming are both there to keep the broth pale; this is a white stew and any browning or clouding shows. Never let it reach a rolling boil, which drives scum back into the liquid.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh. Leave it out rather than substituting dried, or add a little extra parsley with a few tarragon leaves, which approximates its faint anise note.
- The leftover brothOnly three-quarters of the strained broth goes into the sauce. Save the rest to loosen the finished sauce if it tightens, and keep it hot so it does not chill the pan.
- Yield and servingThree pounds of bone-in breast serves four; boneless, four to six. Rice, boiled potatoes or plain buttered noodles are the usual accompaniments, and the dish should be plated the moment it is assembled.
Blanquette comes from the French blanc, white, and the name is a promise about method as much as colour: the meat is never browned, the stock never boiled hard, and the sauce is thickened with a pale roux and finished with egg yolks and acid rather than reduced to a dark gravy. Veal breast, cheap and gelatinous, was the traditional cut, and the yolk-and-lemon liaison is the same technique that finishes a sauce poulette or a fricassee of chicken. Chervil in the herb bundle is a good marker of that lineage; it was a staple of French kitchen gardens and has never quite naturalised in Anglophone cooking.