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Breast of Veal Stewed
(Stufatino di petto di vitella) Break a piece of breast of veal leaving all its bones.
Make a hash with garlic, parsley, celery and carrot; add oil, pepper and salt and put on the fire with the meat. Turn it over often, and when it begins to brown, sprinkle over a pinch of flour and a little tomato sauce or tomato paste diluted in water.. Complete the cooking with broth or water. Finally add a piece of butter and pieces of celery cut in big pieces which must have been before half cooked in water and browned in butter. Care must be taken to keep the saucepan always covered, in this as in other stews. 81
A plain Italian stufatino — meat browned in a chopped vegetable base, then stewed slowly under a lid. The original assumes you know how long veal breast takes; it does not say.
- The hinge: low and slow, lid onBreast of veal is a fatty, collagen-rich cut full of cartilage and rib bone, and it needs 1½ to 2 hours at a bare simmer to become tender. The instruction to keep the pan covered throughout is the whole method: the steam does the work, and lifting the lid to check should be rare.
- "Break a piece of breast of veal"This means cutting it into serving pieces through the bones rather than boning it — a cleaver or a heavy knife at the rib joints. Ask a butcher for breast of veal cut into riblets if you would rather not. Figure 3 lb bone-in for four people.
- "Make a hash"This is the Italian battuto: garlic, parsley, celery and carrot chopped very fine, almost to a paste, so it melts into the sauce rather than staying in pieces. About one clove of garlic, a small carrot, a rib of celery and a good handful of parsley.
- Quantities the recipe leaves outRoughly 3 tablespoons olive oil for the browning, and a tablespoon of tomato paste loosened in half a cup of water. The recipe asks only for 'a pinch' of flour, so a teaspoon or so, dusted over. Add broth or water a little at a time to keep the meat about halfway submerged.
- Brown before you add liquidThe meat and the battuto go into the oil together, so the vegetables can scorch while the veal colors. Keep the heat moderate and turn often, as instructed; the recipe puts the flour in as soon as the meat begins to brown, and it can cook a moment before the tomato goes in.
- The celery garnishThe large celery pieces at the end are a separate operation: parboil 3–4 minutes in salted water, drain, brown in butter, and fold in during the last ten minutes so they keep some bite.
- SaltSalt goes in at the start here, but the dish reduces and may be finished with broth. Taste before serving rather than adding more early on.
- ServingThis is a knife-and-fork stew; bread or soft polenta will take up the sauce. The recipe itself says nothing about what to serve alongside.
Stufatino — a diminutive of stufato, from stufa, a stove or hot enclosed space — is a Tuscan and Roman word for a small covered stew, and the name carries the technique: everything happens under a lid with very little liquid. Recipes of this pattern run all through nineteenth-century Italian domestic cookery, and the book appears to be one of the English-language Italian collections issued for American readers around 1919; its style is close to that of Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (1891), a work widely influential on later Italian cookbooks. The choice of cut is the period speaking: breast of veal was cheap, bony and gelatinous, exactly what a long covered stew wants, and the insistence on browning the meat and parboiling the celery separately shows a cook getting the most flavor out of an economy cut rather than a luxury one.