Veal Breast
Select a good sized breast and knuckle; have the butcher bone the breast and send the bones with the meat. For the stuffing scald one pint of milk, add to it one cupful of dried bread crumbs and, when thick, two well beaten eggs, one tablespoonful of chopped parsley, one quarter of a teaspoonful of dry mustard, a dash of cayenne, and two cupfuls of chopped cold boiled ham. Place this in the breast, roll up the meat, and tie it with stout twine, wrap in a piece of cheese cloth and sew it up. Put in the soup kettle the bones, the knuckle, one small onion, a blade of mace, one bay leaf, four cloves, a small bunch of soup celery, one small carrot and three quarts of water. Bring this slowly to the boiling point, skim, add one-half of a tablespoonful of salt and the prepared veal breast; cover and simmer slowly for three hours; remove the veal and set away to cool. Simmer the contents of the kettle for an hour more; strain. Next morning clarify the stock with the white of one egg, and strain it through a double cheese cloth. Add one-half of a box of gelatine, soaked in cold water; when cool mold the meat in this jelly or it may be served in slices cold or hot with a rich sauce.
A galantine in all but name: stuffed rolled veal poached in its own stock, then set in jelly made from that stock. Nothing here is difficult, but the timing runs across two days and the gelatine measurement needs translating.
- The hinge: keep it at a bare simmerVeal breast is thin, gelatinous muscle that turns stringy if the pot rolls. Hold the liquid at 180-190F, just shivering, for the full three hours, and the cheesecloth-wrapped roll stays intact and sliceable.
- What to buyAsk for a boned breast of veal, roughly 3-4 lb after boning, plus the bones and a veal knuckle (the shank joint) for the stock. Some butchers will want notice for the boning and the knuckle; the knuckle is what gives the stock enough natural gelatine to be worth clarifying.
- "Half a box of gelatine"A box of granulated gelatine in this period is generally reckoned at about 1 oz, so half a box is roughly 1/2 oz -- about 4 1/2 teaspoons, or two modern quarter-ounce envelopes. That will set 2 to 3 pints of stock to a sliceable jelly. Use less if you want it barely trembling.
- The stuffing is a panadaScalded milk plus dried crumbs makes a thick paste; let it cool below 140F before beating in the eggs or they will scramble. Two cups of chopped cooked ham is about 10 oz, and it seasons the whole roll, so go easy adding more salt.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold in blades or ground. One blade is roughly a quarter to half a teaspoon ground. It is not a substitute for nutmeg here so much as a close relative with a finer, more floral note, and it turns up often in the white stocks of this period.
- Tying and wrappingRoll with the grain running the length of the roll, tie at 1-inch intervals with butcher's twine, then wrap in a double layer of rinsed cheesecloth and stitch or tie the ends. The cloth keeps the stuffing from leaching into the stock and gives a clean cylinder to slice.
- "Set away to cool"In the period that meant a cold larder. Cool the meat quickly, then refrigerate it, and chill the strained stock separately overnight so the fat lifts off in a cake. Do not leave either standing at room temperature all night.
- ClarifyingWhisk the egg white into cold, degreased stock, bring it up slowly without stirring, and let the raft form and sit for 10 minutes before ladling the liquid out through damp double cheesecloth. Boiling breaks the raft and you start over.
- YieldA breast this size feeds 8 to 10 as a cold course. Chill the molded jelly at least 6 hours before turning out, and slice with a thin knife dipped in hot water.
Stuffed and rolled veal breast set in its own clarified jelly is the domestic descendant of the galantine, a dish of the professional French kitchen that American cookbook writers of the 1890s and 1900s worked hard to bring into the ordinary household. Veal was cheap in the period and the breast was among its cheapest cuts, full of connective tissue that repaid long, slow poaching; the knuckle thrown into the pot alongside it supplied the gelatine that made a cold jellied dish possible before packaged gelatine was universal. That the recipe still calls for half a box of granulated gelatine marks the transition: Knox and its competitors were making powdered gelatine an increasingly common pantry item around the turn of the century, though how widely it had spread is uncertain, and jellied cold meats moved from an emblem of skilled labor to something a competent housekeeper could set out on a summer sideboard. The instruction to have the butcher bone the breast and send the bones along is a small window on how marketing worked then, when the butcher did the knife work and nothing was thrown away.