Season veal cutlets; dip in beaten egg and roll in fine bread-crumbs. Fry in deep hot lard; keep hot. Chop a few onions with a clove of garlic and fry in a tablespoonful of butter. Stir in 1 tablespoonful of flour until brown; add a little water and the juice of a lemon, salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste. Let boil well; then remove from the fire; stir in the yolks of 2 eggs, and let get very hot; pour over the chops. Serve with French peas.
A breaded cutlet with a lemon-and-egg-yolk gravy poured over it. The recipe gives no quantities beyond the sauce, so treat the numbers below as a working scale for four.
- The hinge: the yolks must not boilOnce the two yolks go into the sauce it can be warmed but never simmered, or it will scramble into threads. "Let get very hot" means hot enough to steam and thicken slightly, around 170-175F, over low heat or off the fire entirely with the residual warmth of the pan.
- QuantitiesFigure four veal cutlets of 4-6 oz each, one medium onion, one clove of garlic, and a tablespoon each of butter and flour. The recipe says only 'a little water' and the juice of a whole lemon; add water in stages to the consistency you want and the lemon to taste, since a full lemon in a small quantity of sauce is sharp. That should give roughly a cup of sauce, enough to nap four plates.
- The cutletsPeriod 'veal cutlets' can mean either a boneless slice from the leg, of the kind a butcher now sells as scaloppine or escalope, or a bone-in rib cutlet; this recipe calls them 'chops' in the last line, which points to the latter. If you use boneless slices, pound them to about a quarter inch so they cook through in two to three minutes a side.
- BreadingThe recipe skips a preliminary dusting of flour. Season, flour lightly, then egg, then crumbs; the flour is what keeps the coating from sliding off in the fat.
- Deep hot lard350-365F. Lard is still sold and fries beautifully, but any neutral oil at the same temperature does the job. Drain on a rack rather than paper so the crust stays crisp while you finish the sauce.
- A brown roux, quickly"Stir in flour until brown" over the fried onions takes three or four minutes of steady stirring. Add the water off the heat and in stages to avoid lumps; stock in place of water improves it considerably.
- NutmegGrated fresh, and sparingly. It is a signature seasoning in Low Countries cooking and in period sauces generally, but a quarter teaspoon is plenty for a cup of sauce.
- French peasPetits pois, the small sweet variety. In this period the term often meant imported canned petits pois; it may also point to peas braised in the French manner with shredded lettuce, a little onion and butter rather than plain boiled. Frozen petits pois are a fair substitute and need only a few minutes.
- ServingSauce the plate or pour over at the table; poured over breaded cutlets and left to stand, the crust softens within minutes.
Books of this kind -- a dish a day, each attributed to a different country -- belong to a familiar pattern of the period, when European cooking was being presented to American home readers partly as a form of armchair travel. The dish itself sits in the wide family of breaded, shallow- or deep-fried cutlets that runs across northern Europe, of which Wiener schnitzel is the best-known member; what marks this one as Belgian in the compiler's mind is the finish -- a brown onion-and-garlic gravy sharpened with lemon and bound with egg yolks off the heat -- and the nutmeg, which turns up persistently in Flemish and Dutch cooking. Liaison with yolks is a classical French technique, and Belgian bourgeois cookery of the period drew heavily on French method while keeping heavier, more northern seasoning. Veal served with 'French peas' was a familiar pairing in the cookery writing of the time, though what it signalled to the book's first readers, and the book's exact date, are not established here.