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Tendrons of Veal with Glazed Onions
Have three and a half pounds tender breast of veal, cut it into three-inch-square pieces, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper and rub the pieces well in the seasoning. Slice one carrot, one onion, two leeks, one branch celery and place them in a roasting pan with two branches parsley, one bean garlic, one bay leaf, one clove and one sprig thyme. Cover each piece of veal with a small, very thin slice larding pork, lay the veal over the vegetables, pork side upward, pour a gill water into the pan and set in a brisk oven for thirty minutes, turning it over once only. Remove, arrange the pieces of veal in a braising pan, skim the fat from the gravy in the pan, add a half gill white broth one gill demi-glace and a gill tomato sauce; lightly mix, then boil for five minutes. Strain the sauce through a Chinese strainer over the veal, cover the pan and set in the oven for thirty minutes more. Remove, dress the veal on a hot dish one overlapping another, and pour the gravy over. Arrange the glazed onions around the dish, sprinkle half teaspoon freshly chopped chives over and serve.
A classical French braise written for a professional kitchen that already has stock, demi-glace and tomato sauce standing by. Most of the work is in assembling those, and in giving the cartilage enough time to soften.
- What a tendron isTendrons are the cartilaginous rib tips at the thin end of the veal breast. Ask a butcher for breast of veal cut across the rib ends, bone-in; the gristle is the point, since it turns gelatinous and sticky when braised long enough.
- The hinge: total cooking timeAn hour of total oven time will not do it. Cartilage needs roughly 1.5 to 2 hours of covered, gentle braising at around 325F before it yields; underdone tendrons are rubbery rather than unctuous. Judge by a skewer sliding through the gristle, not by the clock in the original.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperatures. A "brisk oven" is generally taken to mean a hot one, somewhere around 425F, for the first uncovered stage; drop to a moderate 325-350F once the pan is covered and the sauce is in.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. So: 1/2 cup water in the roasting pan, 1/4 cup white broth, 1/2 cup demi-glace, 1/2 cup tomato sauce.
- White broth and demi-glaceWhite broth is unroasted veal or chicken stock. Demi-glace is reduced brown veal stock; a good commercial reduction or a strongly reduced homemade brown stock both work, but avoid bouillon cubes here, which will make the sauce salty once it reduces further.
- Larding porkThin sheets of fresh pork fatback, cut wide enough to blanket each piece. Barding fat from a butcher is the closest thing; unsmoked pancetta or thinly sliced fresh side pork will do, and salt pork should be blanched first or the seasoning goes off.
- A bean of garlicOne clove; most likely a literal rendering of the French gousse, which covers both "clove" and "pod". A "branch" of celery is one rib; a branch of parsley is a sprig.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve works; press the aromatics lightly to get the body out of them without pushing pulp through.
- Glazed onionsNot given here. Peeled pearl or small boiling onions simmered in water with butter, a pinch of sugar and salt until the liquid reduces to a glossy syrup that coats them.
- YieldThree and a half pounds of bone-in breast serves four, perhaps five. The dish is served in overlapping slabs, so plan for one large or two smaller pieces per plate.
Tendrons de veau are a thrift cut treated with full ceremony: the rib-end cartilage of the breast, worthless roasted but transformed by a long braise into something gelatinous and glossy. The two-stage method here, a hot uncovered roast over a bed of aromatics followed by a covered braise in demi-glace and tomato, is standard nineteenth-century French practice, and the recipe assumes the reader has a stockpot and a sauce station rather than a single saucepan. Alexander Filippini, whose reputation was made in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, wrote for exactly that audience, and his books are generally read as a bridge between the professional French repertoire and the American home cook who wanted to imitate it. The vocabulary betrays the origin at every turn: a "bean" of garlic for gousse d'ail, a "Chinese" strainer for chinois, translated word for word rather than into English kitchen speech.