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Veal Chops Braise, Puree of Sorrel
Flatten and trim six nice, tender veal chops. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Heat a tablespoon fat in a frying pan, add the chops and nicely brown for five minutes on each side. Add half a sliced carrot, half a sliced onion, half bean garlic, a few trimmings larding pork, two branches parsley, one clove, one bay leaf; let brown for ten minutes. Moisten with half gill white wine, one gill demi-glace and half gill tomato sauce; lightly mix, boil for two minutes, then set to bake in oven for fifteen minutes. Remove, dress a puree of sorrel on a hot dish; arrange the chops crown-like, over the sorrel, skim the fat from the surface of the gravy boil for three minutes, then strain the gravy over the chops and serve.
A short brasserie-style braise written in professional shorthand: the chops are browned, aromatics added, then finished in a wet oven. Two of its four liquids and its entire vegetable base are assumed rather than explained.
- GillsA gill is 4 fl oz, half a cup. So half a gill white wine is 1/4 cup, one gill demi-glace is 1/2 cup, half a gill tomato sauce is 1/4 cup — about a cup of liquid in total, which is a moistening, not a submersion.
- "Half bean garlic"A literal rendering of the French gousse d'ail, a garlic clove. Use half a clove, crushed.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, thick enough to coat. There is no substitute that behaves the same way; a good tub of commercial demi-glace or a heavily reduced homemade brown stock is the honest route. Plain broth will leave you with thin, sour pan liquid rather than gravy.
- Trimmings larding porkScraps of fatback or unsmoked salt pork, kept from larding work. A thin slice of salt pork or pancetta, diced, does the same job of enriching the braise.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all; the recipe says only to set the pan in the oven. A moderately hot oven, roughly 375-400F, is a reasonable modern reading for a fifteen-minute finish on chops of ordinary thickness.
- The puree of sorrelAssumed knowledge here, and the dish depends on it: sorrel wilted in butter, then pureed and bound, usually with a little cream or a spoonful of thick bechamel. Sorrel collapses to almost nothing and turns olive-drab within a minute of heat, so expect roughly 1 lb of leaves for six servings and cook it briefly.
- DonenessFifteen minutes suits chops around an inch thick after ten minutes of browning; thick-cut modern chops will need longer. Veal is best pulled at 145-150F and rested, as it dries out quickly past that.
- Finishing the gravySkim the fat before the final three-minute boil, not after, or the reduction emulsifies the grease back in. Strain through a fine sieve and taste for salt, since demi-glace and salt pork both carry their own.
- YieldSix chops, six servings. Serve straight from the oven; sorrel puree does not hold well.
Sorrel and veal is one of the durable pairings of French cooking, and the logic is acid: sorrel leaves are sharp with oxalic acid, which cuts the richness of a demi-glace braise the way a squeeze of lemon would, but with body. Oseille was a kitchen-garden staple across Europe long before it became a restaurant garnish, valued because it comes up early in spring and tastes of something when little else does. The wording of this recipe suggests its origins — "half bean garlic" reads as a literal rendering of gousse d'ail, and the assumption that a cook has demi-glace, tomato sauce and larding-pork trimmings all within reach belongs to a professional French brigade rather than a home kitchen. That professional cast may be why the reader is told exactly how long to brown the carrot but never how to make the puree the dish is named for.