Home › Meats › Veal Olives with Oysters
Veal Olives with Oysters
Cut large, smooth slices from a fillet of veal, trim them into a uniform shape and size, and spread each neatly with forcemeat made of bread crumbs and a little chopped pork, seasoned with pepper and salt. Over this spread some chopped oysters, about three or four to a slice of veal. Roll them up carefully and closely, and pin each with two small tin or wooden skewers. Lay them in a dripping-pan; dash a teacupful of boiling water over them, and roast, basting at least twice with melted butter. When they are brown, remove to a chafing dish, and cover, while you add a little oyster liquor to the gravy left in the dripping-pan. Let this simmer for seven minutes; thicken with a teaspoonful of browned flour, and boil up once. Withdraw the skewers cautiously, so as not to break the olives; pour the gravy over and around them, and serve. If you have no skewers, bind the olives with pack thread. Remove and serve.
A straightforward paupiette: thin veal wrapped around a pork-and-oyster stuffing, roasted, and served in its own pan gravy. The book assumes you know the oven and the butcher's cuts, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- The hinge: pound the slices thinThe recipe says only to cut and trim, but slices from the fillet need to be flattened to about 1/4 inch between sheets of plastic before they will roll closely without splitting. Thick slices roll into lumps that never cook evenly and pull their skewers out.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; the heat is left to the cook's judgement. Roast at 375F; the rolls are small and want enough heat to brown without drying the veal.
- The pork must be fully cookedThe forcemeat contains raw chopped pork sealed inside the roll, which is the slowest-heating part of the dish. Cook until the centre of a roll reaches 160F, roughly 35 to 45 minutes for rolls of this size, rather than stopping at the point where the outside looks brown.
- OystersThree or four chopped oysters per slice, drained, with the liquor reserved for the gravy. They will be thoroughly cooked inside the roll and give up a good deal of liquid, so drain them well or the forcemeat turns loose.
- A teacupfulPeriod teacups are variously reckoned at roughly a half to three-quarters of a cup, smaller than a breakfast cup. Enough boiling water to film the bottom of the pan is the point; it keeps the drippings from scorching.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan until nut-coloured, kept in a jar as a standing kitchen staple. It thickens less than raw flour, so a teaspoon gives a light gravy; if you use plain flour, use slightly less and cook it out in the pan drippings first.
- Skewers and chafing dishWooden toothpicks or cocktail sticks do the work of the small tin skewers, and butcher's twine is the modern pack thread. A chafing dish is a lidded dish set over its own lamp or hot water; here it is being used only to hold the rolls warm, so a warmed platter under foil serves the same purpose while the gravy finishes.
- YieldFigure two rolls per person from a 1 1/2 to 2 lb piece of veal, giving four to six servings. Mashed or boiled potatoes take the gravy well.
"Olives" here has nothing to do with the fruit; it is an old English kitchen term for a thin slice of meat rolled around stuffing, applied for centuries to beef olives and, less often, veal. The word is generally traced to the older "aloes" or "alows," itself borrowed from French, and the resemblance to the olive was a later folk reading of a name cooks no longer understood. The French call the same thing paupiettes. Oysters were cheap and abundant through the nineteenth century, and cookbooks pushed them into stuffings, sauces, croquettes and forcemeats as freely as later books use mushrooms. The instruction to keep the finished rolls in a covered chafing dish while the gravy reduces is suggestive of the chafing dish vogue, though it fixes nothing.