Central Europe · Volume 19, The Court, the Coffeehouse and the Alps Underneath It
Beuschel
Vienna
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 1 hour 30
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Vienna. Veal lung and heart ragout, nose-to-tail Viennese butcher's cooking that, unusually for this repertoire, was not imported from the crown lands. Nearly disappeared from menus as Western taste turned away from offal generally; worth cooking properly precisely because it has become rare.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1.5 hours.
Ingredients
- 600 g veal lung and heart, mixed
- 1 onion, 1 carrot, a small piece of celeriac, roughly chopped root vegetables and onion, for the poaching stock
- 40 g butter
- 40 g flour
- to taste capers, mustard, lemon zest, a little cream
- to taste salt, pepper, marjoram
Method
- Poach the lung and heart gently in a light stock made with the root vegetables and onion until tender, then lift out and cool.
- Finely dice the cooked offal.
- Make a light roux with the butter and flour, moisten with the poaching liquid to a sauce consistency.
- Stir the diced Beuschel through the sauce, season with capers, mustard, lemon zest, marjoram, salt and pepper, finish with a little cream.
- Serve with a bread dumpling (Serviettenknödel) or a plain bread roll.
What a modern chef changes
A precisely controlled poach, and the ragout rebuilt as a considered plate rather than a leftover stew, following Vienna's current fine-dining rehabilitation of exactly this kind of dish
Rung 2
Method
- Poach the lung and heart separately, each to its own optimum texture, at a bare 75°C rather than together at a full simmer. Lung and heart have different structures and overcook at different rates; holding both at a lower, controlled temperature and pulling each when it is properly tender, rather than cooking both together until the tougher piece catches up, gives a genuinely better final texture than the traditional single-pot method allows.
- Reduce the poaching liquid hard and finish the sauce with it rather than diluting a roux with unreduced stock, concentrating the ragout's own flavour before the cream and mustard are added, so the sauce tastes of the offal itself rather than mainly of the roux.
- Plate the diced Beuschel as a considered dish, not a stew, following the example of contemporary Vienna kitchens working seriously with offal: a disc of the ragout, the reduced sauce spooned around rather than over, a small quenelle of the bread dumpling rather than a whole roll alongside. This is presentation rather than a change to the cooking itself, but it is exactly the kind of deliberate elevation that keeps a dying dish on a plate people choose to order again.