Season veal chops with salt and pepper and let fry a few minutes in hot dripping. Remove the chops and cover with a mixture of bacon, liver, onions and parsley minced fine and well seasoned. Then let bake in the oven with 1 cup of beef broth. Baste often and serve very hot.
March 13 — No. 13
Polish
A terse turn-of-the-century braise: chops seared, capped with a raw minced forcemeat, then baked in broth. The original gives no oven temperature, no timing and no yield, so the notes below fill in what the writer assumed a cook already knew.
- The hinge: the topping must cook throughBacon, liver, onion and parsley go on raw and finish in the oven. Keep the mince fine and thin so it cooks with the chops rather than staying pink under a browned crust. Chopped chicken or calf's liver both work.
- DrippingRendered beef or pork fat kept in a crock beside the stove. Any high-smoke-point fat substitutes, though lard or beef dripping gives the flavour the recipe was built around.
- "Fry a few minutes"This is a sear for colour only, two to three minutes a side in a hot pan. The chops finish in the oven, and browning them through at this stage leaves veal dry.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits a dish of this kind; roughly 35 to 45 minutes should see bone-in veal chops done, but the original supplies no timing and the cook must judge.
- The cup of brothOne cup gives a shallow pool in a dish sized to the chops, enough to baste from and to reduce into a sauce. Use an uncovered dish if you want the topping to brown, and top up with a splash of broth if it threatens to dry out.
- Basting"Baste often" means every ten minutes or so, spooning the pan liquid around the chops rather than over the forcemeat, which will wash away if you drench it.
- YieldOne chop per person, so scale by the number at table. The recipe names no sauce beyond the pan juices.
Veal with a liver-and-bacon forcemeat is a pattern that runs through the cooking of Poland, Bohemia and the Austro-Hungarian lands generally, where liver was cheap, plentiful and treated as a seasoning as much as a meat. Books like this one sold the idea that a housewife could travel the world from her own range: one dish a day, each pinned to a nation, most of them simplified to a paragraph. The result is less an accurate record of Polish cookery than a snapshot of how American kitchens imagined it — recognisable bones, national label attached, the details left to the cook. What survives intact here is the technique itself, a sear followed by a moist oven braise with a savoury crust, which is often said to be how a cutlet was handled in that part of Europe.