Roast Veal
Veal is a meat that lacks flavor and richness, and is greatly improved by seasoning with salt, sugar and pepper before it is cooked. Veal will bear more salt than beef, mutton or poultry, and about half as much sugar as salt should be used in seasoning it. Shake the sugar from a dredging box directly upon the meat, then add the salt and pepper. If it is to be stuffed, season to taste with salt and pepper, the desired quantity of crumbs or with salt, pepper and lemon thyme, or with salt, pepper and a combination of grated lemon peel, using very little nutmeg, As and moisten well with melted butter. Fill all available spaces with it; make pockets under the skin and fill them with it, or pack it upon the inside of the roast; roll up tightly, pin with skewers, tie securely with twine, place upon a sack in the roasting pan, and put in the oven. soon as it is a light brown color, baste with a thin gravy, and renew the operation every fifteen minutes until the roast is thoroughly cooked. It requires fully twice as long a time to roast veal as it does to roast beef or mutton, and the frequent bastings keep it from becoming hardened.
The text has come through the scanner garbled — a stray "As" lands mid-sentence and "as soon as it is a light brown color" has been cut adrift — but the method is clear enough. Read it as: season, stuff, roll and tie, then roast with steady basting.
- "Place upon a sack"Almost certainly a misprint for rack. Set the tied roast on a rack in the pan so the underside does not stew in its own drippings.
- Oven temperatureNo number is given. Treat this as a moderate oven, 325–350F, throughout; veal's low fat content means a hot oven dries the outer inch before the centre is done.
- "Twice as long as beef"Ignore the ratio and use a thermometer. Current USDA guidance is 145F in the thickest part of a whole veal roast, with a three-minute rest, and 165F for stuffing. Because rolling carries the outer surface of the meat to the interior, some cooks take a stuffed and rolled roast further, to 155-160F.
- Stuffing safetyPack the stuffing loosely rather than "fill all available spaces" — dense stuffing lags well behind the meat. Check the centre of the stuffing separately with the thermometer, or bake it alongside in a dish.
- The sugarThe instruction is sound and worth keeping: roughly half as much sugar as salt, dredged on first. The recipe gives no amounts; as a starting point on a 4 lb roast, about 2 teaspoons salt to 1 teaspoon sugar, bearing in mind the text's own claim that veal takes more salt than other meats. Sugar also aids browning.
- "A thin gravy"Period shorthand for a light stock, often the pan juices let down with water or broth. Veal drippings are scant, so keep a cup of stock warm for basting.
- Lemon thymeStill sold, but ordinary thyme with a strip of lemon zest gives the same effect. The nutmeg warning is worth heeding — an eighth of a teaspoon is plenty for a whole roast.
- YieldA boneless rolled shoulder or breast of 3–4 lb, the usual cut for this treatment, serves six to eight.
Veal held an awkward place in American cooking: cheap where dairying was common, since bull calves were surplus, but widely judged insipid beside beef or mutton. Nineteenth-century cookery writers repeat the complaint almost formulaically, and the remedies are always the same — heavy seasoning, forcemeat stuffing, bacon or butter to supply the fat the animal lacks, and long basting. The sugar here is the interesting detail. It appears in a number of American books of the period as a corrective for bland meat, though the reasoning behind it is rarely spelled out; the browning it encourages is the likelier reason it works. The insistence on rolling, skewering and tying reflects the cuts a household actually bought: breast and shoulder, thin and irregular, needing to be built into something a roasting pan could handle.