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Breaded Veal Cutlets
1 1/2 pounds fillet or neck of veal. Crisco for frying, 1/2 teaspoon chopped parsley, 1/4 teaspoon grated lemon rind, salt and pepper, egg and breadcrumbs. Cut meat into thin slices, which afterwards trim into neat fillets. Beat egg, mix with it parsley, lemon rind, good seasoning of salt and pepper. Brush cutlets over with this preparation, coat them carefully with breadcrumbs, fry quickly and lightly in hot Crisco. Serve with either tomato or piquante sauce, or, when gravy is preferred, brown little flour in Crisco in frying pan, add little salt and pepper, pour in 1/4 of a pint of hot water, boil up, and strain.
A straightforward breaded cutlet, with the egg wash doing double duty as the seasoning vehicle. A few of the assumptions behind it have shifted.
- CriscoThis book was published by Procter & Gamble to promote their new hydrogenated shortening, hence its appearance in every recipe. Any neutral fat with a high smoke point works here: refined vegetable oil, clarified butter, or a mix of butter and oil for flavour.
- The cut"Fillet of veal" in this period generally means the leg round rather than the tenderloin. Veal scaloppine or cutlets from the top round will do; if you use neck, take it from the best end, which is the traditional cutlet cut, and not the scrag end, which is for stewing. Pound the slices to about 1/4 inch between sheets of plastic so they cook through before the crumbs darken.
- Frying temperature"Hot Crisco" is not defined in the book; for shallow frying, 350-365F is a reasonable modern target, with enough fat to come part-way up the cutlet. Much below that the breading absorbs grease; much above it the crumbs scorch.
- TimingThin veal needs roughly two minutes a side. "Quickly and lightly" is the whole instruction here: overcooked veal goes dry and grainy very fast. Aim for 145F at the centre with a short rest.
- Breading that stays onThe recipe brushes egg straight onto bare meat. A light dusting of seasoned flour first gives the egg something to grip, and the coating is far less likely to slide off in the pan. Let the breaded cutlets sit ten minutes before frying.
- The 1/4 pint of waterMarion Harris Neil was British-trained writing for an American publisher, so this is genuinely ambiguous: 1/2 cup by US measure, 5 fl oz by imperial. Either makes a thin pan gravy for four cutlets; start at 1/2 cup and add more if it tightens too much.
- The pan gravyBrown the flour in the fat left after frying rather than fresh fat, so the browned crumbs and meat juices go into it. A tablespoon of flour to the given liquid is about right. Straining is worth doing if the crumbs have gone dark.
- Yield1 1/2 pounds of veal serves four as a main course. The parsley and lemon rind in the egg are the point of the dish; do not skip the zest, which is what keeps the fried coating from tasting flat.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, and published by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s to persuade American cooks that their newly introduced vegetable shortening belonged in every pan a housewife owned. That is why Crisco appears here in a dish that had been fried in butter, lard or drippings for a century before. The technique itself is much older and pan-European: a thin slice of veal, egg-washed, crumbed and fried fast, appears as Wiener Schnitzel in Austria, cotoletta in Milan, and as "breaded veal cutlets" in English and American cookbooks throughout the nineteenth century. Neil's touch is to fold the parsley and lemon rind into the egg rather than serving lemon alongside, which seasons the crust from within. The lemon is not decorative: veal is mild and fatty-fried, and acid or a piquante sauce is what the plate needs.