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Roast Veal
(Arrosto di vitella) Choose for that milk veal that is to be found all the year round, although it is always better during the spring or summer.
The piece or pieces of veal can be cooked in a saucepan, slightly larded with garlic and rosemary, with oil, butter and a hash of corned beef, salt, pepper and tomato sauce. In the gravy fresh peas can be cooked. 130
This is arrosto morto — a roast cooked in a covered pan on the stove rather than in the oven — set down in the compressed, assume-you-know-it style typical of Italian household books of the period. The instructions leave nearly everything to the cook, so the notes below fill in what the original takes for granted.
- The mistranslation to know about"A hash of corned beef" almost certainly renders carnesecca, the Tuscan word for cured pork belly — pancetta, or in some regions salt pork. It is not beef of any kind. Use 2-3 oz finely chopped pancetta; it melts into the base and does the seasoning work the recipe otherwise omits.
- Milk vealVitella di latte is unweaned, pale, and mild. Ordinary supermarket veal is usually older and pinker, and grass-fed or rose veal is stronger still. Any of them work here, but the darker the meat, the more the tomato and rosemary will need to be kept in check.
- Larding with garlic and rosemaryNot larding in the fat-needle sense. Cut narrow slits into the meat with a paring knife and push in slivers of garlic and short sprigs of rosemary, then tie the joint so it holds shape.
- The pan matters more than the heatUse a heavy pot barely wider than the meat, brown the veal properly in the oil and butter first, then keep it at a bare simmer, covered, turning every twenty minutes. Too large a pan and the small amount of liquid boils off before the meat is done.
- Cut and timingA boned and rolled shoulder or a loin of about 3 lb takes roughly 1½ to 2 hours at a low simmer. Veal is lean and dries badly; pull it at 145F at the centre and rest it fifteen minutes before slicing.
- Tomato sauceMost likely a simple tomato sauce rather than a heavily seasoned pasta sauce, though tomato sauces in Italian books of the period often carried aromatics. Add about a cup, in stages, so the pan never runs dry but the meat is never submerged.
- The peasFresh shelled peas go into the finished gravy for the last 8-10 minutes only, after the veal comes out to rest. Frozen peas need 3-4 minutes. Anything longer and they collapse and grey.
- YieldA 3 lb joint serves six, with the peas and the pan gravy spooned over the sliced meat.
Arrosto morto — literally "dead roast," meaning a roast that never sees an open fire — is one of the workhorses of the Italian domestic kitchen. Veal treated this way, stuck with garlic and rosemary and moistened with tomato, is broadly Tuscan in character, and the technique is set out at length in Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (1891), a book long influential on Italian cookery writing. This translation shows its seams: carnesecca becoming "corned beef" is the sort of slip that follows from reaching for a familiar cured meat and landing on the wrong animal. The numeral at the end is the original's recipe number, not part of the method.