Home › Meats › Fried Veal Cutlets
Fried Veal Cutlets
Make a batter of half pint of milk, a well-beaten egg, and flour; fry the veal brown in sweet lard or beef-drippings, dip it in the batter and fry again till brown; drop some spoonfuls of batter in the hot lard after the veal is taken up, and serve them on top of the meat; put a little flour paste in the gravy with salt and pepper, let it come to a boil and pour it over the whole. The veal should be cut thin, pounded, and cooked nearly an hour. Cracker crumbs and egg may be used instead of batter, but the skillet should then be kept covered, and the veal cooked slowly for half an hour over a moderate fire. If a gravy is wanted sprinkle a little flour in the pan, add salt and pepper and a little water, let come to a boil, and pour over the cutlets; or, pound well, squeeze juice of lemon over the slices, let stand an hour or two, dip in beaten egg and then in fine bread-crumbs (if no stale bread is at hand dry slices in a cool oven), plunge at once into hot fat enough to cover. The slices will brown before they are thoroughly cooked, and the pan should be drawn aside to a cooler place to "finish" more slowly.
Fish may be fried in the same way; when done the meat will separate readily from the bone when a knife is inserted. They may be dipped in milk and then in flour, instead of in egg and breadcrumbs; sift salt evenly over the meat or fish just before serving. The bread-crumbs should be fine; if coarse, they crumble off with the egg in cooking.
Three methods in one entry: batter-dipped, cracker-crumbed, and lemon-marinated with egg and breadcrumbs. All assume a thick, tough, thin-pounded cutlet from a farm calf, which is the source of the one instruction a modern cook should ignore.
- The hour is wrong for modern vealA cutlet pounded thin needs two to four minutes a side, and whole-muscle veal is done at 145F with a short rest. The recipe's near-hour, or even the half-hour it gives for the crumbed version, will give you a dry, grey plank.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. The flour is unspecified because the cook was expected to judge it: work in roughly 3/4 to 1 cup for a batter that coats the back of a spoon without running off.
- Sweet lard and beef-drippings"Sweet" means fresh and unrancid, not sugared. Lard or clarified beef fat still give the best browning here; refined vegetable oil works and behaves the same at 350-365F.
- Moderate fire, and drawing the pan asideOn a range, moderate is roughly medium-low; the book gives no figure, so any temperature is a modern guess. "Drawing aside to a cooler place" describes the cooler zones of a wood-fired range; on a modern burner, simply turn it down after the crust sets.
- Flour paste in the gravyA slurry of flour worked into a little cold water or milk, added to the pan drippings. Add it off the boil, whisk, then return to a simmer for a minute or two so the raw flour taste cooks out.
- Fine crumbs are the hingeThe closing line is the real instruction: coarse crumbs shed the egg and fall away in the fat. Dry the bread in a low oven (200-250F) until it is brittle, then crush and sift it.
- The lemon soakAn hour or two of lemon juice on pounded veal firms and flavours the surface; whether it genuinely tenderises is disputed. Keep it refrigerated rather than standing on the counter.
- The batter frittersThe spoonfuls of leftover batter dropped in the hot fat are a garnish, not a thickener. Fry them until set and golden, a minute or so, and drain before piling them on the meat.
- YieldFigure one cutlet of 5 to 6 oz per person; the recipe gives no yield.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was compiled from contributions by Ohio housekeepers, and its meat chapter reflects a dairying countryside. The breaded cutlet itself is generally traced to the Central European schnitzel and Italian cotoletta traditions, carried into the American Midwest by German-speaking settlers who were numerous in Ohio by mid-century; what marks this version as American is the cook's freedom to substitute cracker crumbs for bread, and the insistence on a pan gravy poured over the whole dish. The entry also shows how such books actually worked: rather than three separate recipes, one paragraph carries every variation a household might need, including the note that fish may be treated the same way, so that a single technique served the whole week's frying.