Take tender veal cutlets; season highly with pepper and salt. Dip in beaten egg and fine bread-crumbs and fry in boiling lard until a light brown. Have ready some boiled macaroni well seasoned. Put on a platter with the cutlets and pour over all a highly seasoned tomato-sauce.
September 24 — No. 24
Italian
A breaded veal cutlet with macaroni and tomato sauce — the ancestor of what American menus later called veal parmigiana, minus the cheese. The recipe assumes you know how to make a tomato sauce and boil pasta, so the only real decisions are thickness and heat.
- The hinge: cutlet thickness"Tender veal cutlets" is all the book gives; for this method the slices need to be thin, pounded to something like 1/4 inch. At that thickness they cook through in roughly the time the crumbs take to brown, 2 to 3 minutes a side; a thick chop will burn its coating long before the centre is done.
- "Boiling lard"Fat does not boil at frying temperature — the term meant fat hot enough to bubble and hiss when the cutlet goes in, about 350 to 365F. Use a half-inch depth in a heavy skillet; lard is still ideal, but any neutral oil works.
- Season highlyTake this literally. The book seasons the meat, the macaroni and the sauce separately, which is what keeps a plain fried cutlet from tasting flat. Salt the crumbs as well as the veal.
- Fine bread-crumbsPeriod crumbs were dried stale bread rubbed through a sieve — closer to fine dry crumbs than to panko. Flour the cutlet before the egg if you want the coating to stay put.
- MacaroniAt this period "macaroni" often meant long tubes rather than elbows, and cooking directions of the day generally call for boiling well past what we would now call al dente. Cook to package time, drain, and dress with butter and salt so it does not sit in a puddle.
- Tomato-sauceNo recipe is given. A simple sauce of canned tomatoes simmered 20 to 30 minutes with onion, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper suits the dish; sauce the plate generously, as the instruction says to pour it over everything.
- Assembly and timingHave the macaroni and sauce hot and finished before the cutlets go into the fat. Breaded veal loses its crispness within a few minutes of being sauced, so plate and serve immediately.
- YieldFigure one 4- to 5-ounce cutlet and about 2 ounces of dry macaroni per person; the recipe as written scales straight up.
This is what a turn-of-the-century American cookbook meant by "Italian": a crumbed and fried veal cutlet, pasta, and tomato sauce on one plate. The cutlet itself descends from the northern Italian cotoletta — the Milanese version is a close cousin of the Viennese schnitzel, and which city borrowed it from the other has often been disputed, though the story usually told to explain the connection is itself of doubtful provenance. Serving it heaped with macaroni and a heavily seasoned tomato sauce, however, is an American habit rather than an Italian one, and it appears here at a time when tomato sauce and dried pasta had become cheap and widely available in the United States, plausibly through the growing Italian immigrant trade. Books of this kind — a dish a day, each labelled with a nationality — were a way for home cooks to sample foreign cooking without leaving the roast-and-boil habits of their own kitchens, and the results tell you more about American tastes than about the countries named.