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Veal and Mushrooms
(Germany.) Make a forcemeat of bread, herbs, some cold veal, yolk of an egg, and milk to moisten. Have ready 8 slices of thinly cut veal; fill with this and roll, tying to keep in shape. Put into a pan with 1 onion, some butter, salt, pepper, parsley, and a spoonful of chopped ham and 1 cup of veal stock. Cook 1 hour, take out, strain the sauce, and add to it 6 mushrooms. Cook these until tender, add a spoonful of sherry and press through a sieve; arrange the veal on this and serve.
A German-style veal roulade, braised in stock and finished with a sieved mushroom sauce. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to stuff and roll a cutlet, so the gaps are worth filling in.
- The hinge: keep the braise at a bare simmerThin veal turns dry and stringy if the liquid boils. Bring the pan to a simmer, then hold it there with the lid on for the hour.
- "Thinly cut veal"Veal scallops or cutlets from the leg, about 3 oz each, pounded between plastic wrap to roughly 1/8 inch. Eight slices would suit four people at two rolls each, though the original does not say.
- The forcemeatRoughly a cup of soft breadcrumbs, half a cup of finely chopped or ground cooked veal, a tablespoon of chopped soft herbs such as parsley or thyme, one egg yolk, and just enough milk to bind. It should hold together, not be wet, or it will squeeze out as the rolls cook.
- "A spoonful"Older cookbooks use this loosely. Read it as roughly a tablespoon for the chopped ham and for the sherry; the sherry in particular is a seasoning, not a braising liquid.
- TyingKitchen twine, two loops per roll, or plain wooden toothpicks. Remove them before the rolls go onto the sauce, which the original assumes but does not say.
- MushroomsThe recipe does not say what kind; read it as six ordinary caps, and since the sauce is sieved they can be sliced thin to cook faster. Cremini give more colour and depth than white buttons.
- Sieving the saucePressing through a sieve was the pre-blender way to get body from the cooked mushrooms. A stick blender does the same job in seconds; strain afterwards if you want it glossy.
- Stock and seasoningOne cup of veal stock for eight rolls is tight in a wide pan. Use a pan that just holds them, and check for salt at the end, since the ham and reduction both concentrate.
Rolled and stuffed veal slices are the backbone of German Rouladen and its smaller cousins, called "veal birds" in English cookbooks for their trussed, plump shape; French kitchens knew the same thing as paupiettes. The technique exists because a thin, cheap slice of meat gains bulk, moisture and flavour from a bread-based forcemeat, and because braising suits veal, which has too little fat to roast well. Books of this sort, arranged as a culinary tour of Europe, collected national dishes for American households, and one might guess that they stripped them to their essentials, which would explain why the seasoning here is left almost entirely to the cook's judgement. The sherry and the sieved mushroom sauce read as a genteel touch, arguably belonging more to the Anglo-American table of the period than to a German farmhouse.