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Stewed Veal
(Stracotto di vitella) The stock from this dish may very well be used to season macaroni or boiled rice. Care to season macaroni or boiled rice. Care must be taken, however, not to draw away all the juice of the meat in order to have a sauce too rich at the expense of the principal dish.
Place in a saucepan one pound of veal or more, bone included, a piece of butter or some olive oil (or the two together) half a medium sized onion, one small carrot, two celery stalks cut in small pieces. Season with salt and pepper. Put it on a low fire, turn the meat over often and when browned add a pinch of flour and some tomato paste, bringing it to full cooking with water poured little by little. The flour is used to keep the sauce together and give it color, but care must be taken not to burn it, because in that case the sauce would have an unpleasant taste and a black, instead of a reddish color. The addition of dried mushrooms, previously softened in the water and slightly boiled in the sauce will add greatly to its taste.
As has been said the sauce can well be used to season spaghetti or risotto. The stewed veal can be served with some vegetable. 40
A one-pot braise written in the loose narrative style of Italian domestic cookery: the method matters more than the measurements. The whole point is slow, patient cooking, and the sauce is treated as a second dish in its own right.
- The hinge: low and slowStracotto means "overcooked" — the meat should go well past done, until it yields to a spoon. The recipe sets no time; for a pound of veal on the bone reckon on a couple of hours or so at the barest simmer, since anything much quicker leaves it tough and gives you no sauce worth putting on pasta.
- Cut of vealUse a braising cut with connective tissue — shoulder, breast or a slice of shank. Modern milk-fed veal scaloppine or loin will dry out long before the collagen has anything to give. Keeping the bone in, as the text says, is what makes the stock worth saving.
- The flourThe pinch of flour goes onto the browned meat and vegetables and must be cooked in fat over gentle heat only until it smells nutty. Scorched flour spoils the taste and turns the sauce black instead of reddish, which is exactly the fault the recipe warns against.
- Tomato pasteStart with a rounded tablespoon, let it fry briefly with the flour to lose its raw edge, then dilute — you can always add more.
- "Water poured little by little"This is deliberate, not vague. Adding small amounts keeps the braising liquid concentrated around the meat rather than boiling it in a thin bath. Aim to keep the liquid roughly halfway up the veal throughout.
- Dried mushroomsMost likely porcini. Soak in warm water 20-30 minutes, lift them out rather than pouring, and strain the soaking liquid through a coffee filter to catch grit — it can go into the pan in place of some of the water.
- Two dishes from one potThe warning about not stealing all the juice is practical: skim off a ladleful or two of sauce for the pasta or risotto and leave the rest with the meat.
- YieldOne pound bone-in serves two as a main course, with a vegetable alongside. Scale up freely; the timing changes little.
This comes from Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919), an early English-language attempt to explain everyday Italian home cooking to American readers, and its sensibility is often said to reflect the Tuscan tradition codified by Pellegrino Artusi a generation earlier, though the debt is hard to document. Stracotto — literally "over-cooked" — is the northern and central Italian name for a long braise, and the recipe's real subject is thrift: a single pound of meat yields both a main course and a meat sauce for a first course of pasta or risotto, which is precisely how a modest Italian household got two dishes out of one purchase. The instruction to guard the meat's juices against the sauce is a small piece of period economics, written for cooks who could not simply braise more veal. The dried mushrooms are the traditional flourish, standing in for the depth that a larger cut or a longer-simmered stock would otherwise supply.