Season tender veal cutlets with salt and red pepper and sauté in hot olive-oil; then cover and simmer until tender. Boil macaroni until tender; drain. Add the macaroni to the veal with 1 cup of stock, and 3 tablespoonfuls of chopped cheese. Let all simmer ten minutes. Put on a platter and cover with bread-crumbs fried in butter. Serve hot.
A one-pan braise typical of the terse newspaper-column style: quantities are left almost entirely to the cook. A few decisions have to be made before you start.
- Quantities to assumeFor four people, figure 1 1/2 lb of veal cutlets and 8 oz of dry macaroni. The single cup of stock is the only liquid given and it is enough only because the pasta is already cooked; do not add the macaroni raw.
- "Red pepper"In American books of this period red pepper usually means cayenne, not paprika and not a fresh bell pepper. No quantity is given; a scant 1/4 teaspoon with the salt is a reasonable level of heat.
- "Chopped cheese"Most likely grated, though finely diced is a possible reading of the word. Parmesan or a dry pecorino gives the right salty edge; three tablespoons is a modest amount, so season the stock accordingly.
- The cutletsVeal cutlets of this period are generally thin slices rather than thick chops. Sear them quickly in the hot oil for colour, then cover and let them go gently until tender -- 15-20 minutes is usually enough; thin veal toughens if it is boiled hard.
- MacaroniBoil it a minute short of the package time. It gets a further ten minutes of simmering with the veal and will otherwise collapse.
- The fried crumbsFresh coarse crumbs fried in butter until they are genuinely brown and crisp, added at the table. Put them on the platter at the last moment or the steam softens them within a minute or two.
- Cutting the vealThe recipe never says to slice the meat, but macaroni and whole cutlets do not eat well together. Cut the veal into strips or bite-sized pieces before the pasta and stock go in.
- YieldServes four as written above.
Day-a-dish calendar cookbooks were a small publishing genre around the turn of the twentieth century, offering American households a year's worth of dinners with one entry per date and, in this case, one nation per entry. The "Italian" label reflects how Italian cooking reached the general American table in that era: through macaroni, olive oil and grated cheese, the three markers that signalled Italy to a reader who had probably never seen a regional Italian cookbook. Veal with pasta and a topping of buttered crumbs recalls the Italian habit of finishing baked and braised dishes with pangrattato, a practice most strongly associated with the south, where crumbs served as a cheap substitute for grated cheese, though the compiler almost certainly was not making any such distinction. The brevity is characteristic of the format rather than of the cook's competence; readers were expected to know how much macaroni feeds a family and how long a cutlet needs, and the column supplied only the idea.