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VEAL CUTLETS (another way) (Take two or three cutlets)
Take two or three cutlets about three-quarters of an inch thick from the best end of the neck of veal. Flatten them with the cutlet-bat, sprinkle pepper and salt upon them, and fry them in butter or lard six minutes on each side. Take them up, drain them, and put them aside till cool. Take a sheet of stiff paper for each cutlet. Trim the edges to make it as nearly as possible of the shape of the cutlet, and be careful to leave a tolerably wide margin for folding over. Oil the paper, lay on it a slice of bacon, a spoonful of sauce, the cutlet, another spoonful of sauce, and another slice of bacon. Double the edges of the paper all round that the sauce may not escape. When the cutlets are to be served, broil them over a very slow fire, and turn them over that they may be equally cooked. Serve them on a dish in the papers. The sauce with which they are to be covered may be made as follows. Thicken a pint of nicely-flavoured stock with an ounce of flour. Boil it till it is smooth. Strain it, put it back into the saucepan, and boil till it is reduced to half the quantity. Stir into it a little grated ham, a little parsley, half a tea-spoonful of minced shallots one or two chopped mushrooms if they are to be had, and a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, and keep stirring for a few minutes. The sauce should form a stiff jelly when cold, and if the stock of which it is made is not sufficiently strong for this a little gelatine may be dissolved in it to make it so. Time to broil the cutlets, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. to 1s. 2d. per pound.
This is veal en papillote under an English name: the cutlets are browned, sealed in oiled paper with a jellied sauce and bacon, and finished gently so the paper puffs and the sauce melts around the meat. The paper package is the whole point, and it is also the part most likely to go wrong over a modern heat source.
- Cook the paper parcels in the oven, not over flameOiled paper over a live fire is how this was managed on a range with a controllable low grate. Set the wrapped cutlets on a baking sheet in a 400F oven for 12-15 minutes instead; the sauce melts and the meat finishes through without any risk of the paper catching.
- Cut back the frying timeTwelve minutes total for a 3/4-inch veal chop leaves it grey and dry before it ever reaches the paper. Brown it hard for 2 minutes a side and no more, since a further quarter of an hour of gentle cooking follows.
- Best end of the neckThis is the rib end, sold now as veal rack or rib chops. Loin chops work equally well. Ask for them cut a full 3/4 inch and pounded only lightly, just to even the thickness.
- Cutlet-batA flat meat mallet or the base of a small heavy pan. The bat was smooth, not toothed; the aim is to level the chop, not to shred it.
- Paper and the sealParchment, not greaseproof or foil. Cut a heart shape roughly twice the width of the chop, brush with oil, build the layers on one half, then fold and crimp the open edge in small overlapping pleats. A loose seal means the melted sauce runs out onto the tray.
- The sauce quantitiesAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so a pint reduced by half gives about 10 fl oz (1 1/4 cups) of thick sauce, far more than two or three cutlets need. Make a third of the quantity, or keep the rest for another dish. One ounce of flour to a pint is a fairly light veloute that only becomes stiff once it is reduced by half, and the flour must be cooked out for several minutes or it tastes raw.
- Why it must set to a jellyThe sauce is spread cold and firm so it stays put while the parcel is folded. If your stock is not gelatinous enough to set, a little powdered gelatine dissolved in it will do the job; commercial cartons of stock almost never set on their own.
- BaconUse thin, unsmoked streaky bacon or pancetta. Heavily smoked supermarket bacon will dominate the shallot, mushroom and nutmeg entirely.
- Yield and servingTwo or three cutlets serve two or three people, one parcel each. Send them to table unopened on a warm plate, and let each person cut the paper; the aroma released is the reason for the technique.
Cooking in paper was a French professional trick that English books absorbed wholesale in the nineteenth century, en papillote being the standard kitchen term for it; Cassell's, aimed at ambitious middle-class households rather than restaurant staff, translates the method into instructions a cook could follow with a sheet of stiff paper and a slow grate. The insistence that the layered filling — ham, parsley, shallot, mushroom, nutmeg bound in a reduced stock — set to a jelly reflects a kitchen where stock was made from bones daily and was expected to stiffen in the larder overnight.