Veal

This is a unique rendition (and spelling) of veal parmigiana that I had in Rigazzi’s, one of the oldest restaurants on The Hill in St. Louis. It exemplifies the frugality and the ingenuity of those early immigrants. Instead of expensive veal cutlets, they ground lesser, tougher cuts of veal, then shaped them and treated them like a veal cutlet; the result was delicious and tender! At Rigazzi’s, it was the special of the day when we visited.

Poached veal tongue is one of the ingredients in the classical Italian dish bollito misto, boiled mixed meats. It is one of my favorite dishes, but even without the other four or five meats I enjoy the poached tongue. The brining somewhat cures the meat and makes it retain the lively pinkish color throughout.

This recipe will seem long to you, but read it through once or twice and it will become very clear that all we are doing is stuffing a piece of meat, roasting it, and making gravy to serve it with. That’s something I’m sure you have done any number of times—only in this case it is a breast of veal, which will yield delicious results. Breast of veal—bone-in breast specifically—is another wonderful meat cut that I hope you come to love as much as I do. Like the preceding shoulder cuts, it has a good deal of connective tissue, bones, and cartilage, which contribute to the flavor and texture of the meat, especially during long cooking. Because it comes from young animals, the ribs in the breast are just developing: there’s lots of soft cartilage, and you can just pull out the ribs after cooking, so serving and slicing are convenient. Stuffing the breast is the fun part. The muscle layers easily separate and hold a generous amount of savory filling; then, when it’s cooked and sliced, the cross sections of meat and stuffing make a beautiful presentation. It looks like an eye, with the meat as the lids. If you’ve tried any of the other roasts in this chapter, the procedure here will be familiar: covered roasting for tenderness and flavor, dry roasting for deep color and crisp textures—and developing a great sauce at the same time. The only difficulty you may find with this recipe is getting a nice big piece of veal breast, preferably the tip cut. It’s not always easy for me either, as you’ll understand when you read the box and study the technique photos here and on page 357. But if we all keep asking our butchers for veal-breast tip cuts, they’ll get the message—we want those excellent, traditional cuts of meat, and we want to stuff them ourselves!

You don’t need to go to Ferdinando’s in Palermo to enjoy these savory rollatini. They’re easy to assemble and cook in just a few minutes on the grill. For a lovely main course in summer, serve with a tossed green salad or a tomato-and-basil salad.

Tortelli are ravioli by another name—a square, filled pasta. And though they vary greatly, like all pastas, tortelli often are filled with fresh ricotta and spinach or other greens, herbs, or vegetables. In Maremma, where carnivorous appetites rule, such a meatless approach is not typical. As you’ll find in this set of recipes, tortelli maremmani have meat inside and outside—and lots of it. Fried chopped chicken livers plump up the tortelli, in addition to ricotta and spinach. Once cooked, the tortelli are dressed with a typical ragù maremmano, made with three chopped meats slowly cooked in tomatoes. My friend Alma likes best boar, chicken, and pork, but here I call for veal, pork, and sausage, because I find that combination comes close to the complexity of the boar. Of course, if you can get boar, by all means use it. This is a great pasta, and worth all the stirring and stuffing. However, it is not necessary to make everything here and put the ingredients together in just one way. The components of tortelli maremmani give many options for delicious meals (and convenient advance preparation). For instance, it’s fine to make the filling and the pasta for the tortelli and leave the ragù for another day. You can sauce your tortelli simply with sage butter, pages 49–50, or just shower them with Tuscan olive oil and Pecorino Toscano. On the other hand, go right to the ragù recipe—skip the tortelli—and make this marvelous sauce to dress any pasta, fresh or dry, or polenta or gnocchi. Indeed, the ragù recipe makes enough for two or more meals. Toss a couple of cups of ragù with spaghetti for a fabulous (and fast) supper one night, and freeze the rest. It will still be perfect whenever you do get a chance to roll and fill those plump tortelli maremmani.

This quick rendition of breaded cutlets with a lively relish will be a favorite at your house, I am sure. For a special brunch, top a cutlet with a fried or poached egg.

Veal cheeks make the most delicate braise. Using a combination of water and wine for the braising liquid allows the sweet, subtle taste of the veal to really shine through. As a side, you need nothing more than the spring’s first ramps and some gorgeous porcini, kissed by the grill. Some years, it just so happens that the ramp season runs long, or perhaps the porcini season starts early, or both. When the two magically coincide, some amazing things happen. Using foil as insulation for the delicate ramp tops gives the vegetables a simple char on the grill. The veal needs time to become fork-tender, a few hours in all, so plan accordingly.

This riff on veal piccata is not a complicated dish, but it does have a few steps to it and requires some planning to allow the sweetbreads time to soak overnight. Poaching the sweetbreads in milk and aromatics before sautéing them ensures they’ll turn out sweet and meltingly tender. I prefer veal sweetbreads, though you can use lamb. Either one is usually sold in one-pound packs, with two large lobes per pack. If you don’t see them out on display—they’re usually not—ask the butcher if there are any in back, and make sure they are impeccably fresh. The delicate richness of the dish means that nothing more than boiled potatoes are needed as an accompaniment.

Tender veal is most commonly served in lighter preparations because of its delicate nature, but the porterhouse cut is substantial enough to allow for a truly rich and deeply flavorful sauce such as this one. Intensely sweet dried figs steeped in wine join a reduction of wine and veal stock to form a syrupy glaze that coats the veal in flavor. Cabernet vinegar (though another red wine vinegar will do) balances the figs’ inherent sweetness with its bright acidity. Uncommon as they are, veal porterhouse chops make this a memorable, special-occasion dish, but you could certainly substitute thick-cut pork chops with excellent results.

For hundreds of thousands of years, we burned bones in the fire and then broke them open to slather our food (and faces and bodies) in the butter-fine marrow. Scooped from roasted veal bones and spread on a wedge of crusty bread, marrow is so rich and flavorful that it threatens to overwhelm. And that’s where the salt comes in. The strident mineral tones of a coarse sel gris penetrate through the fatty richness, letting fly its myriad dimensions—like cutting a ruby from a hunk of Burmese rock. If marrow hadn’t been created by nature, it would have been necessary to invent it just to have a food that strikes so squarely at the core of the eating experience. If it weren’t for sel gris, nature’s felicity would all be for naught.

I still remember the first time I tasted this dish. I was sixteen years old and working my first cooking job to earn some pocket money at a restaurant in my hometown that served European food. Until then, I had almost no exposure to Western cooking (I hadn’t even tried pizza yet!). This dish was a bit of a culture shock for me, but I quickly became enchanted with Italian pasta. For the recipe, you can substitute ground veal or ground pork, if you like. Any leftover sauce can be frozen for up to a month.

I’m sure every cook who loves Italian food has a special recipe for osso buco. But I’m not so sure that anyone has a recipe to serve one, because it’s not the sort of thing you make for just one person. But it’s simple to reduce. The crucial factor is the pot; you need that heavy 4-cup pot with its own lid, so that your shank piece just fits into it and the liquid level stays almost to the top of the meat while it is simmering. That way, you don’t require too much cooking liquid, and the flavor develops intensity. I sometimes make this on a Saturday afternoon, when an Italian opera is playing on the radio, and just hearing the singing and smelling the osso buco as it perks away on the stove heightens my anticipation of a lovely meal to come.