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VEAL CUTLETS, BROILED (a l'Italienne)
Take the best part of a neck of veal: cut the ribs one by one, flatten them, and pare them nicely, powder over a little salt and pepper, take the yolk of an egg, and with a paste-brush rub the cutlets with part of the egg, then dip them first in the bread-crumbs, then in melted butter, and afterwards in the crumbs of bread again; give them a good form, and broil them on slow fire, that they may get a fine brown colour. Serve with a brown Italian sauce, Spanish sauce, or gravy.
A plainly written breaded chop, notable mainly for its double crumbing with melted butter in the middle — that is the step that makes it worth cooking. A few Victorian shorthand terms need translating.
- The cut"The best part of a neck of veal" is the rib end, so what you want from a modern butcher is veal rib chops, cut one bone thick, about 3/4 in. "Pare them nicely" means trimming them to a tidy shape; it may extend to scraping the bone clean, what is now called frenching, though the text does not specify.
- FlatteningFlatten only the meaty eye of the chop, between plastic wrap, to an even 1/2 in. Pounding the whole chop thin makes it dry out before it colours.
- The double crumbEgg, crumbs, melted butter, crumbs again is the hinge of the recipe. The butter between the two crumb layers is what browns and crisps the coating without frying, so let the crumbed cutlets firm up in the refrigerator for 20-30 minutes or the coating will slide.
- Egg quantityThe recipe brushes the cutlets with only part of a single yolk, so it clearly expected one yolk to go a long way. If you find it does not stretch, use one whole egg per two or three chops, loosened with a teaspoon of water.
- "Broil on a slow fire"This means a grid over dying coals, not a modern overhead broiler on full heat, which will scorch the crumbs long before the veal is done. Use a medium-low grill, or set the pan 6-8 in. below a moderate broiler, turning once.
- DonenessVeal chops are cooked to 145F internal with a three-minute rest; that is roughly 10-14 minutes total for a 3/4 in. chop over gentle heat. This recipe gives no doneness cue beyond colour, so judge it by temperature rather than by cooking it through.
- The saucesBrown Italian sauce is sauce italienne — an espagnole or demi-glace finished with duxelles of mushroom, shallot, white wine and chopped herbs. "Spanish sauce" is simply espagnole itself. A good reduced brown stock with a little wine and butter answers for either.
- YieldOne chop per person; the recipe gives no number, and how many you get depends on the rib count of the piece. Serve with something sharp -- lemon, or a green salad -- since the coating is rich with butter.
Cassell's belongs to the era when English cookery books catalogued dishes by their French dress, and à l'italienne here refers not to Italy directly but to the classical French sauce italienne, a brown sauce with mushrooms and herbs codified in the nineteenth-century repertoire. The breaded veal cutlet itself sits in a long European family that includes the Milanese cotoletta and the Viennese schnitzel, whose common ancestry is much argued over and generally traced to the same practice of crumbing and gently frying thin veal. What marks the Victorian English version is the broiling: gridiron cookery over coals was standard in the kitchens these books were written for, and the melted butter between the two crumb coats does the work that a pan of hot fat would do elsewhere. Veal was a comparatively expensive, genteel meat in this period, and a neck cut down into individual ribs was a way of making a modest joint look like a dinner-party dish.