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Veal En Daube
Procure a three-pound piece of veal with a little fat on from rump. Heat a tablespoon lard in large saucepan, place veal in and brown all over for fifteen minutes, turning once in a while, remove and lay on a plate. Mix two tablespoons flour in same pan, add a half pint water, a gill each claret and demi-glace and a tablespoon brandy. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Cut two carrots and two turnips in quarters, add to pan with six each small onions and sound, peeled raw potatoes, mix well, then add veal. Cover pan, boil for five minutes, set in oven for an hour and fifteen minutes, frequently basting meanwhile, and bring veal to oven door.
Finely chop together two branches parsley and one branch chervil, add to pan and mix well without mashing vegetables. Dress veal on a large hot dish, skim fat off sauce, pour contents of pan over veal and serve.
A straightforward braise, but the original assumes a professional larder and a coal range. Two things need attention before you start: the demi-glace, and the fact that the potatoes go in at the beginning.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the range had none. A covered braise of this kind wants a moderate oven, 325-350F, held steady for the full hour and a quarter.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. So half a cup of claret and half a cup of demi-glace, against the half pint (one cup) of water.
- Demi-glaceThe reduced, thickened brown veal stock of a professional kitchen. A cup of good unsalted brown stock reduced by half gives the same effect; a stock concentrate dissolved in water is the honest shortcut. Season at the end if you use a salty commercial product, since the recipe's teaspoon of salt assumes an unsalted base.
- Saltspoon and branchA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A branch of parsley or chervil is a sprig, not a stem of the whole bunch.
- ClaretPeriod shorthand for dry red Bordeaux. Any dry, unoaked red works; avoid anything jammy or heavily oaked, which will dominate veal.
- The potatoesSix whole small potatoes braised for eighty minutes will be soft to the point of collapse, and the instruction to mix in the herbs "without mashing vegetables" admits as much. Add them at the halfway mark if you want them intact, or accept that they will thicken the sauce.
- The five-minute boilNot a cooking step but a way of bringing the whole pan up to temperature before it goes into the oven, so the braise does not stall. Do not skip it. Note that the recipe does call for frequent basting, so the cover comes off periodically during the oven time.
- DonenessA three-pound rump of veal is lean and braises to tenderness rather than to a temperature. Test with a skewer: it should meet almost no resistance. Rest it ten minutes before carving while you skim the sauce.
- YieldSix generous servings with the vegetables, and the sauce is enough for all of them without further thinning.
Daube is Provençal in origin, generally traced to Italian and Spanish forms such as dobba and adobar; the daubière, the narrow-necked earthenware pot with a lidded well on top that let cooks bank coals above as well as below the meat, sealing in steam over hours of gentle cooking, takes its name from the dish. Classically a daube is beef, red wine and orange peel; what appears here is the restaurant reading of the term, in which "en daube" simply means a whole joint braised in a covered pan with wine and root vegetables and served with its own sauce. The tells are the demi-glace and the spoonful of brandy, neither of which belongs to a farmhouse daube and both of which are often said to come from the professional kitchen, where a standing pot of reduced brown stock made every braise taste alike in the best way. Veal rump was the natural cut for it.