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CUTLETS (au Jambon)
Cutlets au jambon are cooked in the same way as Cutlets a la Chingara (see CUTLETS, VEAL, A LA CHINGARA), with the exception of ham being substituted for the tongue.
This is a one-line variation rather than a standalone method: it sends you to the veal cutlets à la Chingara and asks for a single swap. Everything that matters is in that parent recipe, so the notes below cover the swap and the assumptions the original leaves unspoken.
- What à la Chingara means"Chingara" appears to be an older English spelling of zingara, French cookery's "gypsy style"; in the classical repertoire this means sautéed cutlets finished with a brown sauce sharpened with tomato and Madeira, garnished with a julienne of tongue, ham, mushrooms and truffle. Cassell's own parent recipe should be checked, as the swap here affects the garnish rather than the sauce.
- The ham to buyVictorian ham was generally dry-cured and boiled before slicing, and saltier than most modern deli ham. A good cooked unsmoked ham or prosciutto cotto, cut thick and shredded into julienne, is the closest match; a heavily smoked ham will dominate the Madeira.
- Salt the sauce lastBecause both the ham and the reduced brown sauce carry salt, season the sauce only after the julienne has warmed through in it. Period stocks were generally made unsalted so they could be reduced; commercial stock bases are not.
- Cooking the cutletsVeal cutlets of about 3/4 inch want 3-4 minutes a side in clarified butter over brisk heat, to roughly 145-150F internal, then a short rest. Veal past that point dries and tightens, and no amount of sauce recovers it.
- Keep the garnish out of the panHam julienne should be added to the finished sauce off the boil, just long enough to heat. Simmered, it goes stringy and leaches salt into the sauce.
- YieldOne cutlet per person, with a few tablespoons of sauce and a small handful of julienne each; follow the quantities given in the parent recipe.
Cassell's ran to thousands of short entries, and cross-references like this one are how the book kept its bulk manageable: a whole family of veal cutlet dishes hangs off a single worked method, with each variation reduced to the one ingredient that distinguishes it. The parent dish, à la zingara, belongs to the classical French repertoire codified in the later nineteenth century, where a scatter of names — zingara, chasseur, milanaise — attached fixed garnishes to interchangeable cuts. Zingara is Italian for gypsy, though the name has no documented connection with Romani cooking. Tongue and ham both appear in the entry as garnish, and the substitution recorded here is a variation within a single worked method rather than a separate dish.<br><br>