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Loin Roast of Veal
Veal requires a longer time to roast than mutton or lamb. Allow a quarter of an hour to each pound, or twenty-one minutes to the pound. Heat gradually, baste frequently at first with salt and water, afterward with gravy. When the meat is nearly done, dredge lightly with flour and baste once with melted butter. Skim the gravy, thicken with a teaspoonful of flour, boil up. Should the meat brown too fast, cover with white paper. The juices, which make up the characteristic flavors of meat, are oftener dried out of veal than any other flesh.
A method rather than a formula: no oven temperature, no weight, no seasoning list. The one thing worth carrying forward is the warning at the end, which is the whole problem with roasting veal.
- Oven temperatureThe book assumes a range oven and gives none. Roast a loin of veal at 325F throughout; "heat gradually" is the wood-stove equivalent of not searing a lean cut hard at the start.
- Ignore the minutes-per-poundFifteen to twenty-one minutes a pound at an unspecified heat will take a modern loin well past dry. Cook to internal temperature instead: 145F at the thickest point, away from bone, then rest 10 minutes before carving.
- Why veal dries outThe closing sentence is the hinge. Veal has little intramuscular fat and a high water content, so it loses moisture fast and has nothing to lubricate the meat once it does. Bard the loin with a sheet of fat or a few strips of bacon, or brown it and finish it covered.
- "Gravy" means the pan drippingsNot a finished sauce. Baste with salt and water while the pan is still dry, then switch to the fat and juices that collect underneath as the roast renders.
- White paperA sheet laid loosely over the browning surface; the recipe does not say whether it was greased. A loose tent of foil does the same job, and a strip over exposed bone ends will keep them from charring.
- The flour dredgeA light dusting near the end plus one basting of melted butter gives a thin browned crust. It is cosmetic; skip it if you intend to thicken the drippings anyway.
- ThickeningOne teaspoon of flour to the skimmed drippings is very light. The recipe skims first, then thickens and boils up; if you want a smooth result, slake the flour in a little cold water or stock before adding, and let it boil to lose the raw taste.
- YieldA bone-in loin roast will generally give two to three servings per pound depending on how much bone. Season with salt and pepper before it goes in; the recipe specifies no seasoning beyond the salt in the basting water.
Veal held a much larger place on the American table in the past than it does now, a shift usually traced to dairying: bull calves were a byproduct of keeping cows in milk, and butchers are generally said to have had them in quantity in the spring. That seasonal glut is the usual explanation for why older books carry pages of veal cutlets, fricandeaus, pot roasts and calf's head dishes alongside a single terse note on the loin. The anxious tone here reflects a real difficulty of the period, cooking a very lean cut in an oven with no thermostat and no thermometer; the constant basting, the flour dredge and the sheet of paper are all workarounds for heat the cook could not measure. The advice that veal's juices are "oftener dried out" than any other meat is the most durable line in the entry, and it is still the first thing to know about the cut.