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Blanquette of Veal
(France.) Cut up, and soak in water for an hour, 2 pounds of the shoulder of veal. Drain it and cover with water, adding salt, pepper, and a bayleaf. Boil slowly and skim often, for an hour. Take out the meat, put it with 2 ounces butter, parsley, and an onion, and then, when a pale yellow, add 1 ounce flour, 1/2 pint fresh peas, and 1 cup of the gravy. Strain the rest, add the yolk of an egg and the juice of a lemon, and pour over all.
A compressed version of a classic French white veal stew. The instructions assume a cook who already knows that the egg yolk goes in off the heat; that is the one thing the text does not say and the one thing that decides whether the sauce works.
- The hinge: the liaisonThe yolk and lemon juice are beaten into the strained hot broth off the heat, then poured over the meat. If the sauce returns to a boil after the yolk goes in it will curdle into grainy threads. Warm it gently to nappe consistency at most, whisking constantly.
- "Gravy" means the cooking brothThere is no separate gravy here. The liquid the veal simmered in is the gravy: one cup goes into the pan with the butter and flour, and the remainder is strained and enriched with yolk and lemon.
- MeasuresHalf a pint of fresh peas is about a cup shelled, roughly 5 oz; frozen petits pois work and need only a few minutes. Two ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons, one ounce of flour about 3 1/2 to 4 level tablespoons. If the book means an imperial pint of 20 fl oz rather than a US pint of 16, the peas increase by a quarter, which does not matter here; the butter and flour are weights and do not change.
- The soakSoaking cut veal in cold water for an hour draws out blood so the finished sauce stays pale — the whole point of a blanquette. It is not a food-safety step and can be shortened, but the stew will be greyer.
- Simmer, do not boil"Boil slowly" means a bare simmer with the surface barely moving. Shoulder veal in hard-boiling water tightens and goes stringy; skim the grey foam in the first ten minutes. The book allows an hour, though a stubborn piece of shoulder may need longer to yield to a fork.
- Sequence in the panButter, parsley and a whole or halved onion go in with the drained meat and are cooked only until pale yellow — no browning, or the sauce turns beige. Then the flour, cooked a minute or two without colour, then the cup of broth.
- Seasoning at the endThe broth is salted at the start and then enriched, so taste again after the yolk goes in. Lemon juice is the balancing element; add it to the yolk rather than to the pan so it disperses evenly.
- YieldTwo pounds of shoulder serves four, with rice, boiled potatoes or plain buttered noodles to take the sauce.
Blanquette comes from blanc, white, and names a whole family of French stews defined by what they refuse to do: no browning of the meat, no dark stock, no colour in the roux. Veal shoulder, mild and gelatinous, was the classic choice, finished with a liaison of egg yolk and lemon or cream, a technique running through medieval European cookery long before flour-based sauces dominated. The book's framing gathers a national dish into a terse paragraph, one country per entry, apparently on the assumption that the reader had a cook or enough technique to fill the gaps. Hence the label "(France.)" standing in for any explanation, and the silence on the single detail — keeping the yolk below a boil — that a trained kitchen would have taken for granted.