Home › Meats › Larded Veal Shoulder
Larded Veal Shoulder
Have all bone removed from a shoulder of veal, roll it up tight and put two skewers at each end. Cut in small strips half pound of larding pork and lard all the top of the shoulder. Remove the rind of a quarter pound of bacon, cut it in thick slices and garnish the bottom of a braiser with them. Add one tablespoonful of butter to the bacon. When hot put the meat over it and let it brown for fourteen minutes. Pour over slowly while stirring one quart of hot broth. If not at hand, half a teaspoonful of beef extract diluted in the same quantity of warm water or of broth will answer. Season with one carrot, one onion, a bouquet of a small bay leaf, three sprigs of parsley, half a branch of white celery, two cloves, a very tiny branch of thyme, one teaspoonful of salt and one saltspoonful of black pepper. Put only half of this seasoning if broth is used. Have all the bonès cut in pieces; add half of a veal knuckle. Place also a piece of paper buttered over the sauce-pan and put on the cover. Cook on a slow fire constantly for three hours. Remove the skewers and pour half of the gravy over the shoulder through a strainer; serve the other half in a sauce boat.
A classic braise that survives translation intact: the only real obstacles are the larding, the vanished measures, and the fact that a boned, rolled shoulder needs tying rather than skewering.
- Tie it, don't skewer itTwo skewers at each end will not hold a boned shoulder through three hours of braising. Roll it and tie with butcher's twine at 1-inch intervals; a 4-5 lb boned shoulder is the right size for a quart of broth.
- Larding porkFresh pork back fat, cut into long batons and threaded through the surface with a larding needle. Salt pork rinsed of its cure is the usual stand-in. If you have neither needle nor fat, bard the roast instead: lay thin sheets of fat or the bacon over the top and tie them on.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. One teaspoon of salt for a 4-5 lb roast plus a quart of liquid is on the light side by modern taste; salt the meat itself the day before if you want it seasoned through.
- BraiserA heavy lidded pot just large enough to hold the meat — a Dutch oven does the job. The liquid should come partway up the roast, not cover it.
- The buttered paperA round of buttered paper, what a French kitchen calls a cartouche, laid over the pan under the lid as the recipe directs. It slows evaporation and keeps the exposed top of the roast from drying. Worth doing; it is the difference between a moist shoulder and a stringy one.
- "Slow fire" for three hoursEasier to control in a 300F oven than on a burner. The liquid should barely tremble. Veal shoulder is collagen-rich and wants to reach about 195F internally and stay there — go by tenderness, not the clock, and give it longer if a fork still meets resistance.
- Veal knuckle and bonesThe knuckle is the joint end of the leg, sawn across; with the shoulder bones it supplies the gelatin that makes the gravy cling. Ask a butcher to saw them, or substitute a pound of veal or beef marrow bones. Brown them alongside the meat for more colour.
- Beef extractThe period substitute for stock — Liebig's, Bovril and their kin. Half a teaspoon in a quart of water is very thin. Note that the recipe tells you to use only half the seasoning if real broth is used. Unsalted veal or chicken stock is the better modern choice.
- Finishing the gravyStrain, then let it settle and skim the fat — half a pound of larding pork and a quarter pound of bacon leave a good deal of it. Reduce if it tastes thin. The instruction to sauce the roast with half and send the rest to table separately is sound.
- YieldA shoulder of this size serves eight to ten, sliced across the roll.
Larding — threading strips of pork fat through lean meat — was a standard defence against dryness in an era when veal was young, lean and often cooked long past what we would now consider done. The technique is French in pedigree, and the whole construction here (bacon on the bottom of the braiser, a bouquet of bay, parsley, celery and thyme, a buttered paper under the lid, bones and a knuckle for body) is straight out of professional continental practice. The alternative offered for those without broth on hand — beef extract diluted in warm water — dates the page as much as anything: meat extracts were an industrial novelty of the later nineteenth century, sold as both a kitchen shortcut and a health tonic, and cookbooks of the period routinely allowed them where an earlier generation would simply have assumed a stockpot on the back of the range.