Truro and the The Real Veal Meal

For the last decade Veal, the pale flesh of a young cow, has been shunned, and for good reason:

• Calves are taken from their mothers at one week old and grown in dark plastic cages for the first three months of their lives.
  
• Then they spend another month in "down time" where the veal farmers try to keep the cattle in an emotional state somewhere between "solemn" and "in malaise" for as long as possible. The more depression the calves experience the more tender the meat, it's that simple.
• The veal Calves are then sent from all over Europe, via a very crammed cattle wagons, on a drive-by tour of Nazi concentration camps and then on to the slaughter house for a very long, prolonged and upsetting death.

Hence it surprised me this morning as I took my normal Saturday sojourn through Truro's fair meandering alleyways and streets and, of course, its wonderful weekly farmer's market. For there, midst the vegetables and smoked cheese hawkers was a stall blatantly purveying this flesh blessed by Beelzebub himself.

The Mengele of Moo offered me a parchment and I began to read.....

A few moments later....


"Is that good for burgers?" I asked, at this point bathing in the realization that this veal wasn't the bad veal, this was the good veal. This was the veal that was essentially the cow version of lamb. This was the veal that was vealized using bull cows from a dairy herd that would have been killed anyways, at birth. BAM. Bolt Through The Head.

Ive had a bit of an issue with meat of late. I know I should be vegetarian. We all should be: eating meat is very bad for the planet in so many ways. But some meat is so good. And Truro is so good for meat that it's bad. The South African stall in the market that sells biltong far cheaper than eBay.... the smart-ass-yummie-delies with their perfect combinations of meat with healthy stuff like alfalfa.

And now this man who sells a veal that I have a moral imperative to eat because if I don't I am practically firing the bolt through the head of a five second old baby bull!!! I thought perhaps the credentials of the veal's moral status might actually turn my domestic assistant away from her near two decades of vegetarianism. But no, or at least, not yet.


Myself and the farmer-merchant conversed some more about his veal and I purchased 500 grams of veal mince for £1.75 because, frankly, I'm not paying eight quid, for something that might actually taste rank.

One Way Veal Burgers Take enough veal mince for your burger. Season with Maggi sauce and chilli. Cook only one side until the middle of the top is cooked to your satisfaction. This will result in an isotropic thermal gradient within the burger and thus a stratification between chargrilled and moist/tender. During cooking apply vertical pressure along the burger's Y axis with a soft utensil. This will squeeze out juice and fat which you must move away from the burger using the utensil a la tende. When cooked remove from heat and bisect the burger along the X axis, flipping one half fully along its z axis. Place rejoined burger on a glazed blueberry raft. Drizzle with Schadenfreude (If you cant get this try Teriaki marinade from Tesco) Finish with a bouffant of grated Parmesan

And this is the result:

Veal has the potential to turn a normal One Way Burger into a One Way Veal Burger, and you don't have to be Heston Blumenthal to know that its the only meat like this, in this regard.

I don't know if Bocaddon Farm will be selling their ethically wholesome veal in Truro again. I don't know if they did If I would buy some. I don't know if it tastes , in burger form at least, much much better than beef or if it really does taste like chicken. But I do know this: man, newt or bovine, everything that lives must one day die.