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March 24
Menu: Calf's Tail Soup; Braised Fillet of Veal; Braised Belgian Endive Potato Puree; Pour; Beet and Cabbage Salad; Banana Trifle; Coffee Braised Fillet of Veal-31½ pounds veal, 14 pound larding bacon, 1 onion, 1 carrot, 1 turnip, 1/2 lemon, forcemeat, stock and a little celery. Remove bone, fill in cavity with forcemeat. Cut some even strips of bacon 14 of an inch thick, and with a larding needle thread neatly on top of meat. Slice vegetables, place them in a pan, set veal on these, sprinkle with a little lemon juice. Cover with Criscoed paper, and add stock to come three-parts up the meat. Cover closely and set pan in oven (in order to get top heat also) or over a gentle fire, and simmer 2½ to 3 hours. Remove veal to a dripping tin with very little stock, and brown in front of fire or in hot oven. Reduce stock in pan, meanwhile, by fast boiling without lid, and strain round meat. Garnish with cut lemon, and, if liked, with curled bacon and forcemeat balls. The forcemeat is made as follows: A 1/4 cup Crisco, 4 tablespoons chopped cooked ham, 1 cup breadcrumbs, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, 1 teaspoon mixed herbs, thyme, and marjoram. Add salt and pepper to taste, and mix with 2 well-beaten eggs.
A classic braise-then-brown treatment for a boned veal leg or rump, stuffed with a ham-and-crumb forcemeat and larded with bacon. It is straightforward once the archaic quantities and the two-stage cooking are clear.
- The hinge: braise gently, brown afterwardsThe veal is cooked covered in stock at a bare simmer, then moved to a shallow tin and given dry heat only at the end to colour it. Browning first, or letting the braise boil, dries out lean veal and toughens the fillet.
- Quantities that need reading twiceThe weights as printed run together: the veal is a roast of roughly 3 to 3½ pounds, the larding bacon about a quarter pound, and the bacon strips a quarter of an inch thick. Judge the meat by fit rather than by the figure, since it must sit on a bed of sliced vegetables in a lidded pan.
- Oven settingsBraise at about 325F for the 2½ to 3 hours specified. For the final browning, 425F for 15 to 20 minutes, or under a broiler, is the modern equivalent of the "hot oven" or the open fire.
- Criscoed paperA round of paper greased on one side and laid directly on the meat, fat side down. Buttered parchment does the same job; it keeps the exposed top of the joint from drying while the lower part stews in stock.
- LardingA larding needle threads strips of fat bacon through the surface of the lean meat. If you have none, lay bacon rashers over the top and tie them on with kitchen string, then remove them for the browning stage so the surface can colour.
- Internal temperatureThe book gives none. Stuffing cooked inside a joint should reach 165F at the centre of the forcemeat, which contains raw egg; check there rather than in the meat.
- The forcemeatA quarter cup of Crisco, or any solid fat, worked into a cup of dry breadcrumbs with the ham, herbs and two beaten eggs. Pack it loosely into the bone cavity, since it swells; leftover mixture rolls into the balls suggested for garnish and can be fried or baked alongside.
- The sauceAfter the meat comes out, boil the braising liquid hard, uncovered, until it coats a spoon, then strain. Taste before salting, as the ham and bacon have already seasoned it.
- YieldA joint this size serves six to eight. Rest it 15 minutes before carving so the forcemeat sets and the slices hold together.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new product: a shortening made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil rather than from a pig or a cow. A dated dinner-calendar arrangement, associated with A Calendar of Dinners, the retitled and expanded form of the same P&G book, assigned a full menu to every day of the year, which is why a braised veal fillet carries the date March 25 and sits beside a note on coffee. The dish itself is squarely English-French in manner, the sort of larded, stuffed, braise-and-glaze joint that ran through nineteenth-century household manuals, and its appearance here is deliberate: by showing Crisco greasing the braising paper and binding the forcemeat, the book placed the new fat inside recipes cooks already trusted. Veal was then a common and comparatively cheap butcher's meat in American cities, and larding was routine practice for it, since the flesh carries almost no fat of its own.