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Stuffed Breast of Veal, Florentine
Carefully remove the rib bones from a tender breast of white veal. Make a deep incision on the large end, season all around and inside with a good teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon pepper. Remove the stalks from a quart of fresh spinach, then thoroughly wash and plunge in a quart boiling water with a teaspoon salt and boil for ten minutes. Drain on a sieve and with a skimmer press out all the water, finely chop and place in a saucepan with two egg yolks, a half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Sharply stir on the fire while cooking for five minutes, spread the spinach on the incision of the breast, sew it up, place a mirepoix in a braising pan, lay the breast over, add one-half ounce butter, then cook on the fire for ten minutes. Moisten with one gill white wine, one pint broth and two gills demi-glace, cover the pan and set in the oven for two hours, being careful to baste the breast frequently so as to obtain a nice bright brown colour. Take out, lift up the breast, remove string, dress on a hot dish. Skim the fat from the gravy, reduce it on the open fire for eight minutes. Strain through a Chinese strainer over the veal, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A classic braised veal breast with a spinach stuffing, written for a professional kitchen that already had stock and demi-glace on hand. Nothing here is unsafe; the work is in the boning, the pocket and a long, patient braise.
- The hinge: braise long enoughVeal breast is collagen-rich and only becomes tender when the connective tissue has broken down — figure fork-tender rather than a target like medium. The recipe gives two hours and no weight; a larger breast may want longer, and the meat is better checked than timed.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven temperature. A covered pan at a moderate 325-350F suits it: any hotter and the liquid boils rather than simmers, which tightens the muscle before the collagen yields.
- Old measuresA gill is half a cup, so one gill of wine is 4 fl oz and two gills of demi-glace is one cup. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon — so the cayenne and nutmeg are seasonings, not dominant flavours.
- A quart of spinachThis is a volume of raw leaves, and the weight depends entirely on how tightly they are packed; either way it cooks down to well under a cup. Squeeze it genuinely dry: wet spinach will loosen the stuffing and weep into the pocket.
- Egg yolks in the stuffingThe five minutes of sharp stirring over heat is what binds the spinach so it slices cleanly. Keep the pan moving and the heat moderate or the yolks scramble into grains.
- Mirepoix and demi-glaceMirepoix here means a bed of roughly diced onion, carrot and celery, sometimes with a little bacon or ham trimming. If you have no demi-glace, use a cup of well-reduced brown veal or beef stock; the point is body in the finished sauce, since the braising liquid is only reduced for eight minutes at the end.
- Boning and sewingAsk a butcher to remove the rib bones and cut the pocket, and keep the bones to add to the braising pan. Butcher's twine and a trussing needle work better than trying to skewer the opening shut; sew loosely, as the stuffing swells slightly.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the fine conical strainer. A fine-mesh sieve does the same job.
- Yield and carvingA boned breast will generally serve six to eight. Let it rest ten minutes before slicing, and cut in fairly thick slices across the roll so each one shows a band of green.
"Florentine" in French and Franco-American kitchen language simply signals spinach, a convention generally traced to the Italian cooks and produce that followed Catherine de' Medici's household to France in the sixteenth century — a story told so often in cookbooks that it functions as tradition rather than documented fact. What is certain is that by the time this book was compiled, à la florentine had hardened into a professional shorthand any hotel cook would read at a glance. The dish itself belongs to the economical end of grand cuisine: breast is the cheapest cut of veal, full of cartilage and bone, and the classic answer was to bone it, fill the resulting pocket with something cheaper still, and braise it until the toughness became an asset. The demi-glace and the chinois in the last lines give away the origin of the recipe — this is restaurant work, written by someone who expected a stockpot to be simmering somewhere behind him.