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VEAL CUTLETS (a la Dauphine)
Take six fine cutlets of veal, and pare them on one side only, but all on the same side: lard them like a fricandeau, only let the bacon be cut finer; let them be braised also in the same manner as a fricandeau; then reduce the liquor in which they have been stewed, and glaze them with it. Serve up with either endive or sorrel. Probable cost of veal cutlets, from 1s. to 1s. 2d. per pound.
The instructions assume you already know how to make a fricandeau, which is the whole method here: lard, braise slowly in a little stock, then boil down that stock to a syrupy glaze and paint it over the meat. Everything else is detail.
- What the cutlets areIn Victorian books a veal cutlet is usually a slice from the fillet or cushion, though some writers cut them from the loin or neck. Ask for veal top round or a thick escalope; scaloppine slices are too thin to hold lardons or survive braising.
- Larding, and what to lard with"Bacon" here means firm unsmoked pork back fat cut into thin strips and threaded through the surface with a larding needle. Modern streaky bacon is smoked and wet-cured and will overwhelm the veal; salt pork or fatback, blanched briefly, is closer. The recipe directs that they be pared and larded on one side only, and all on the same side.
- Braising like a fricandeauA fricandeau is braised slowly in a little stock, covered, until a skewer meets no resistance. A bed of sliced onion and carrot, stock no more than halfway up, buttered paper under the lid, and a very low oven or the barest tremble on the hob will reproduce it; the book itself gives no temperature or time.
- The glazeStrain the braising liquor, skim the fat, and reduce it hard until it coats a spoon and looks like dark syrup. Spoon it over the cutlets in thin successive layers, returning them to a hot oven for a minute between coats; that repeated glazing is what gives the fricandeau finish.
- Endive and sorrelNineteenth-century "endive" is the curly-leaved chicory, braised in stock and buttered, not Belgian witloof. Sorrel is stewed down to a coarse green purée; its sharpness is there to cut the fat, so do not sweeten it much.
- Cost noteThe shilling-per-pound figure is consistent with later nineteenth-century Britain but is of no use as a price today. Veal of this cut is now among the more expensive meats.
- YieldSix cutlets serve six as a main course with a vegetable and potatoes.
The fricandeau is one of the set pieces of French kitchen technique that English cookery books of the nineteenth century adopted wholesale: a larded cut of veal braised until tender and finished with its own reduced liquor. Cassell's assumes the reader has already met it and so writes this variation in shorthand. The name à la Dauphine attaches to a scattering of unrelated dishes in period cookery and is generally taken as a courtly flourish rather than a fixed formula. What the recipe really records is the Victorian habit of treating veal as the blank canvas of the meat larder — mild enough to need larding for fat, glazing for savour, and a sharp green like sorrel alongside to keep the whole thing from being merely rich.