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Veal Chops
Trim neatly 8 chops and put into frying pan with 4 tablespoons Crisco, and fry over quick fire an nice brown color. As the meat will afterwards be cooked again, the frying process should be done quickly without actually cooking the chops. Place them between 2 boards, put weight not too heavy over top, and keep them until cold. Strain Crisco, and keep for further use. Cut 1/2 cup pork and 1/2 cup beef marrow into small pieces, pound in mortar; when fine, add 1 tablespoon anchovy paste, 1 teaspoon powdered savory herbs, 1 yolk egg, and piece of Crisco about size of nutmeg. Pound thoroughly until smooth, season with pepper and salt, rub through sieve, and cover side of each chop thickly with this. Put them on Criscoed baking sheet, cover with few fried breadcrumbs, sprinkle with melted Crisco and place in hot oven for 10 minutes. Dish up chops in circle on hot dish, and serve.
A two-stage chop: seared, pressed cold, then masked with a rich marrow forcemeat and finished under crumbs. The forcemeat is where the dish succeeds or fails.
- CriscoThis is a Crisco promotional cookbook, so the shortening appears in every step. Any neutral fat works — vegetable oil or clarified butter for the frying, softened butter or shortening in the forcemeat. "A piece about the size of a nutmeg" is a small lump, at most about a tablespoon.
- Quick fire, hot oven"Quick fire" means a hot pan over high heat, long enough to colour the surface only. The book gives no temperatures; "hot oven" in cookery of this period is usually rendered as somewhere around 400–450F.
- Sear, do not cookThe instruction not to actually cook the chops through is the hinge. Veal chops given a full fry and then ten minutes in a hot oven will be dry and grey. Aim for colour in about a minute a side.
- Chill in the refrigeratorThe pressing between boards flattens the chops and firms them so the paste will adhere. Do it on a plate in the refrigerator, not on the counter — partly cooked veal left out to cool is exactly the window bacteria want.
- Beef marrowSold by butchers as marrow bones; roast or scoop the marrow out raw and it will render into the forcemeat as it cooks. If you cannot get it, use an equal quantity of pork back fat, though the result is less silky. The recipe says only "1/2 cup pork"; it most likely means raw uncured pork rather than bacon or ham, but it does not specify.
- The forcemeatA mortar and a sieve were the only way to get it smooth in 1915; a food processor does the whole job in under a minute. Pound or pulse to a genuine paste — a coarse mixture will slide off the chop in the oven.
- Raw pork in the coatingTen minutes is enough for a thin mask but not for a thick one. Spread it no more than about a quarter-inch deep. The mask is pounded raw pork and raw egg yolk, so treat it as ground meat: it should reach 160F and be firm and set through, with the chop itself at least 145F at the centre.
- Savory herbs and anchovy"Powdered savory herbs" most likely means a dried mixed-herb blend of the period, though the recipe does not say which herbs. Anchovy paste is still sold in tubes and is salty, so hold back on the salt until you have tasted a pinch of the cooked mixture.
- YieldEight chops serve four generously. The strained frying fat, as the recipe says, keeps for other cooking.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening launched in 1911, which is why a fat appears in nearly every line of a recipe that would once have called for butter, lard or drippings. The dish itself is older than the book: masking a cooked cutlet with a pounded forcemeat and browning it under crumbs is standard nineteenth-century French practice, and the combination of marrow, anchovy and dried herbs belongs to that tradition of savoury pastes used to enrich lean meat. Veal chops were a natural candidate — the meat is mild and dries out easily, and a fatty mask both flavours and protects it. Beef marrow was a routine larder item when households bought bones for stock as a matter of course, and its retreat from home kitchens is a fair measure of how much butchery habits have changed.