Roast Veal
The leg, cushion (thickest part of leg), and loin are suitable pieces for roasting. When leg is to be used, it should be boned. Wipe meat; sprinkle with salt and pepper; stuff and sew in shape. Place on rack in dripping pan, dredge meat and bottom of pan with flour, and place around meat strips of salt pork. Have oven hot 450°F. until meat is seared over; then reduce. Bake three or four hours in moderate oven 350°F., basting every fifteen minutes with one-third cup butter melted in one-half cup boiling water, until used; then baste with fat in pan. Serve with brown gravy. 2 pounds veal pound fat salt pork 2 teaspoons salt teaspoon pepper
The method here is sound barding-and-basting technique, but the roasting time belongs to an era before meat thermometers and before veal was expected to stay pink. Read the timing as the one thing to ignore.
- The ingredient list is incompleteThe printed quantities have lost their fractions ("pound fat salt pork", "teaspoon pepper"). The stated 2 pounds of veal also sits oddly against a three- to four-hour roast. If you scale up to a larger boned leg or loin, reckon on something like 1/4 to 1/2 lb of salt pork in thin strips, 2 teaspoons salt and about 1/2 teaspoon pepper.
- The basting liquidThe original calls for one-third cup butter melted in one-half cup boiling water. That is a single batch used up over the course of the roast, after which you baste with the drippings.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockThree or four hours will take a modern veal roast well past grey. Roast to an internal temperature of 145F at the thickest point, then rest 15 minutes; on a 4-5 lb boned and stuffed roast that is usually under two hours after the initial sear.
- Oven temperaturesThe book already gives the numbers: 450F to sear the surface, then down to 350F for the remainder. Give the oven a full 15 minutes at the lower setting to settle before you start timing.
- Why the salt porkVeal is very lean and has almost no intramuscular fat, so the strips of salt pork are barding, not flavouring. Lay them over the top surface where the meat is most exposed rather than only around the sides.
- The flour dredgeFlouring the meat and the bottom of the pan is the first step of the gravy. The flour toasts in the fat and drippings, so the brown gravy is simply a matter of adding stock or water to the pan and whisking off the fond.
- Stuff and sewA boned leg needs to be tied or sewn into a compact cylinder or the stuffing cooks faster than the meat around it. Butcher's twine at 1-inch intervals is easier than a needle and does the same job.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. As printed, 2 pounds of boned veal will serve about four; a larger boned roast scaled up accordingly will stretch further, with some left for cold veal.
Veal was a common American roast well into the twentieth century, a by-product of dairying: bull calves had no place in a milking herd, so their meat was cheap and widely available in cities. The method printed here, with its salt pork barding and its butter-and-water basting, is the standard treatment for very lean meat in early twentieth-century domestic cookery, descended from the older practice of larding roasts with strips of fat pushed into the flesh. The extremely long roasting time reflects both the period's preference for thoroughly cooked meat and the reality of ranges whose thermostats, where they existed at all, were not to be trusted.