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Veal Paupiettes, Stockholm
Procure six slices of veal from the round, quarter inch thick and of three ounces each. Neatly flatten them to even size. Season all around with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Mix in bowl an ounce of butter, three tablespoons bread crumbs, half teaspoon chopped parsley, two saltspoons salt and saltspoon grated nutmeg, then evenly spread this preparation over the slices of veal, roll them up, tie them around with a string. Place in a braising pan a few thin slices of larding pork, lay the paupiettes over and brown on the fire to a nice golden colour. Take them up, remove the lard from the pan. Add two tablespoons flour to the pan, stir well. Moisten with pint of broth, add two branches parsley, one branch chervil and a tablespoon vinegar, then mix well until it comes to a boil. Place the paupiettes in the pan. Season with half teaspoon salt and saltspoon cayenne, place the lid on and set in the oven thirty minutes. Remove, lift up the paupiettes, untie, dress on a dish. Briskly boil the sauce ten minutes, strain it through a Chinese strainer over the veal and serve.
A straightforward braise of stuffed veal rolls, written for a cook who is assumed to know how to tie a paupiette and read a braising pan. The gaps worth filling are the units, the oven temperature the book never gives, and the very heavy hand with salt.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The stuffing therefore takes half a teaspoon of salt in addition to the teaspoon rubbed over the meat and the further half teaspoon in the sauce — two teaspoons in total for six small rolls. Cut it back, particularly if you are using a commercial broth, which is already salted.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A covered braise of this size wants 325–350F; thirty minutes at that heat will cook three-ounce rolls of quarter-inch veal through without drying them.
- Larding porkSalt pork or unsmoked fatback, sliced thin and used purely as a browning fat — it is lifted out and discarded before the flour goes in. Bacon will work but brings smoke and cure flavours the dish does not expect.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve does the job; the point is to catch the parsley and chervil branches and any flour lumps.
- Veal from the roundAsk for veal cutlets or scallopini from the top round, pounded to an even quarter inch. Turkey breast cutlets are a common substitute where veal is scarce or unwanted, and behave similarly in a short braise.
- The stuffingThree tablespoons of crumbs to an ounce of butter makes a stiff paste, not a loose filling. Spread it thin and leave a clear margin at the far edge so it does not squeeze out as you roll.
- TyingTwo loops of kitchen twine per roll, snug but not strangling. Untie before saucing, as instructed — the strings are hard to find once the sauce is over them.
- The final boilTen minutes of brisk reduction is what turns a floury pint of broth into something worth pouring. Do it while the paupiettes rest, and taste before you strain, since the tablespoon of vinegar can want balancing.
- YieldSix paupiettes: three servings as a main course with potatoes, six as part of a larger meal.
Paupiette is French kitchen vocabulary — a thin slice of meat spread with forcemeat, rolled and braised — and the technique is old enough to appear under a scatter of regional names: olives in English cookery, roulades in German, involtini in Italian, birds in the older British books. The "Stockholm" tag here is harder to account for; one might guess at the grand-hotel convention of the period, in which a garnish or a seasoning detail was said to be enough to attach a city's name to a standard preparation, though what in this version is meant to be Swedish the page does not say. Books of this kind seem to have been assembled in the years when transatlantic hotel kitchens drew on classically trained French cooks, and they collected such national dishes by the hundred; the "world's kitchen" they describe may well be the world as filtered through a professional French brigade rather than any Swedish home.