Home › The Principles of Cookery › VEAL CUTLETS (a la Pandore)
VEAL CUTLETS (a la Pandore)
Take five cutlets from the loin, trim them, and make an incision in the thick part, in which insert a little foie gras. They must then be sewn up, and braised on a bed of vegetables with a little stock and a buttered paper over. When done, glaze them, remove the threads, and dish in a row,with croutons the same shape, but smaller, in between. Lay a little pile of foie gras on each crouton, and put any nice vegetable puree round the dish. Probable cost, 2s. 6d.
A Victorian dressed entrée: veal loin chops stuffed with foie gras, braised gently, glazed, and set up on fried bread with a vegetable purée. The original assumes a cook who already knows how to braise, so most of the work here is filling in the numbers.
- The cutlets"Five cutlets from the loin" means five loin chops, roughly 3/4 to 1 inch thick, trimmed of flap and excess fat. The recipe gives no time; veal loin is lean, and something like 45 minutes of gentle braising should do it -- pushed well past that it dries out even in liquid.
- Stuffing and sewingCut a horizontal pocket into the thick meat from the outer edge, not all the way through, and pipe or spoon in a teaspoon or so of foie gras parfait or terrine. Close it with a couple of stitches of butcher's twine and a trussing needle, or secure with cocktail sticks; the point is to keep the filling from leaking as the fat softens.
- The bed of vegetablesA standard braising bed: sliced onion, carrot and celery, about 2 cups in total, in a heavy pan just large enough to hold the cutlets in one layer. Stock should come no more than a third of the way up the meat, so it braises rather than boils.
- Buttered paperA cartouche. Cut parchment to the diameter of the pan, butter one side, and lay it directly on the meat under the lid. It keeps the exposed surfaces from drying and traps a little steam without waterlogging them.
- TemperatureThe recipe gives no temperature, and braising of this kind would have been done over a low fire. As a modern equivalent, about 325F for 40 to 50 minutes after bringing the liquid to a simmer on the stovetop, or the barest simmer on a low burner.
- To glazeStrain the braising liquid, skim the fat, and reduce it hard until it coats a spoon, then brush it over the cutlets. This is where the dish either shines or looks dull; a thin liquid brushed on will simply run off and pool.
- CroutonsBread cut to the same outline as the cutlets but smaller, fried in clarified butter until crisp and drained. Cut them before frying, not after, and keep them dry until the moment of serving or they collapse under the foie gras.
- Yield and costFive cutlets serve five as a plated course, or four generously. The "2s. 6d." is the book's own cost estimate for its own day and cannot be converted usefully now.
- Sourcing foie grasProduction and sale are restricted in some jurisdictions, and it is expensive everywhere. A smooth chicken liver parfait behaves the same way in the pocket and on the crouton, though it is more assertive in flavour.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery catalogued hundreds of these "à la" garnish formulas, the shorthand of nineteenth-century professional kitchens: name the garnish and a trained cook knew the whole plate. Titles of this sort were often coined for a patron, a theatre, or a classical figure, and à la Pandore is generally taken as the French form of Pandora, though the specific occasion behind it is not documented. What is solidly of its period is the construction: a lean cut braised under buttered paper, glazed with its own reduced liquor, and lifted off the dish on fried croutons with a purée piped or spooned around the rim. Tinned and potted foie gras from Strasbourg and the Périgord had by the 1870s become an item a well-stocked English grocer could supply, which is why a book aimed at ordinary households could treat a spoonful of it as an unremarkable stuffing.