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VEAL CUTLETS (a la Zingara)
Take a tolerably thick slice from the fillet of veal. Cut it into round pieces convenient for serving, trim these neatly, and fry them in a stewpan with hot butter or lard till they are lightly browned. Drain off the fat, and pour upon the cutlets as much brown sauce as will cover them. Put into the saucepan with them two ounces of grated ham, an onion stuck with one clove, a large carrot, grated, and a small bunch of sweet herbs. Simmer all gently together over a slow fire till the cutlets are tender. Take them up, and keep them hot. Have already prepared as many slices of lean ham or of cold tongue as there are cutlets; they should be trimmed to the same shape and size. Fry these in butter for five minutes. Arrange the cutlets in a circle on a hot dish with a slice of ham or tongue between each. Strain the sauce and serve it in the centre of the dish. Time to stew the cutlets, about one hour and a half. Probable cost, veal, 1s. to 1s. 2d. per pound.
A braised cutlet dressed in the zingara manner, and everything depends on the sauce and the cut. Read the timing note before you start.
- The cut"Fillet of veal" in British usage of this period means the top of the leg, not the tenderloin — what a butcher now sells as veal top round or leg steak. Ask for a slice a good inch thick so it survives a long braise; thin scaloppine will be dry and stringy in twenty minutes, let alone ninety.
- TimingAn hour and a half is right for a thick round of leg meat held at a bare simmer, and wrong for anything thinner. Judge by feel rather than the clock: the meat should yield to a fork without shredding. Keep the liquid below a boil throughout or the muscle tightens and squeezes out its juice.
- Brown sauceThe book assumes a pot of brown sauce already made, of the espagnole type. A good reduced brown veal or beef stock, lightly thickened, does the same work; the point is a sauce with body enough to coat, since it is both braising liquid and finished sauce.
- StewpanA stewpan here is a wide, straight-sided pan with a lid — a sauté pan or shallow braiser. You want the cutlets in a single layer and just covered by the sauce.
- Sweet herbsA bouquet garni: parsley stalks, thyme, a bay leaf, tied. Tie the herbs and keep the clove pushed firmly into the onion so both come out cleanly before straining.
- Grated ham and carrotGrated rather than diced, both break down into the sauce during the braise and are strained out, leaving savour and little texture. Use a dry-cured ham, not a wet-brined sandwich ham.
- TongueCold cooked ox tongue was a standing item in a Victorian larder and is now a special order from a butcher, or sold pressed in a jar. Prosciutto cotto or a thick slice of good cooked ham stands in without changing the character of the dish.
- Assembly and yieldFry the ham or tongue slices only until warmed through and lightly coloured — the five minutes in butter the recipe allows is ample, and longer makes them leathery. The book gives no yield; a thick slice from the fillet will produce perhaps four to six rounds, enough for three or four with potatoes and a green vegetable.
À la zingara is French kitchen shorthand for "in the gypsy style," and it came to be codified around the turn of the twentieth century, in the Escoffier era, as a fairly fixed garnish: ham or tongue, and often mushroom and truffle, in a brown sauce sharpened with tomato and madeira. The name belongs to the Romantic taste for picturesque national and ethnic labels on restaurant menus rather than to any Romani cooking tradition, and the association is sometimes explained \ eed\ — traditionally rather than on any documented evidence — by the paprika or the smoked meat. Cassell's version is a plainer, household reading of it, dropping the truffle and letting grated ham and carrot do the flavouring work, which is characteristic of how the Dictionary translated restaurant garnitures for cooks working with a single stewpan and a pot of brown sauce. The price note, veal at a shilling or so a pound, marks it as a respectable but not extravagant dinner-party dish for a middle-class table.