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Veal Cutlets, Curried
Cut one pound of veal from the fillet into neat squares convenient for serving, and free from skin, bone, gristle, or fat. Beat these well, and dip them twice into beaten egg and bread-crumbs seasoned with curry-powder. Fry in a little butter over a gentle fire, and turn them so that they may be equally cooked. Put them into a dish, and pour some good curry sauce round them. Serve very hot. If liked, the cutlets may be broiled instead of being fried, and then they will require only to be brushed over with clarified butter, and to have curry-powder sprinkled upon them instead of being dipped into the beaten egg and seasoned bread-crumbs. The curry sauce may be prepared as follows. Slice two large onions, and steam them in butter in a closely-covered saucepan till they are soft without being at all coloured. Add a sour apple pared, cored, and minced, and replace the saucepan upon the fire till the apple is tender. Rub the ingredients through a sieve, and mix the pulp with a dessert-spoonful of ground rice, a dessert-spoonful of curry-paste, and half a pint of stock. Simmer the sauce for twenty minutes, and it will be ready for serving. If this sauce is too pungent, a spoonful of curry-paste may be stirred into half a pint of plain gravy made in the pan in which the cutlets were fried. Time to fry the cutlets, twelve to fourteen minutes.
A straightforward crumbed-and-fried veal dish with a Victorian onion-and-apple curry sauce. Two details need attention: the cut and the frying time.
- The cut"Fillet" of veal in British usage is the leg, not the tenderloin — the American equivalent is top round or leg cutlet. One pound serves two to three as a main course.
- Beat them wellThe squares are pounded before crumbing; the recipe does not say how thin, though something around 1/4 inch is the usual reading. Pounded cutlets will be dry if you cook them the full fourteen minutes.
- Frying timeTwelve to fourteen minutes suits thick pieces over the very low fire the book assumes. Thin pounded cutlets on a modern burner need about three minutes a side over medium heat, until the crumbs are deep gold and the meat is just firm.
- Dip them twiceEgg and crumbs applied twice gives a thick, durable coating. Season the crumbs generously with curry powder — a tablespoon per cup is not too much, since curry powder is the only seasoning the recipe gives the crust.
- Gill and half-pintHalf-pint and dessert-spoonful -- An imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. A dessert-spoonful is roughly 2 teaspoons.
- Steam them in butterThis is sweating: onions cooked covered in butter over low heat with no browning at all, 15–20 minutes. Colour would darken the sauce and change its flavour, which is why the instruction is emphatic.
- Curry-paste and curry-powderVictorian commercial curry pastes were generally stiff, oily, vinegared blends, closest today to a mild Madras paste. Both paste and powder are pre-blended and mild by current standards.
- Rub through a sieveA blender does this in seconds. The ground rice is the thickener, and the twenty-minute simmer cooks out any raw starchiness.
- Broiling insteadThe alternative — clarified butter and dry curry powder, no crumbs — works well under a hot broiler, about 2 minutes a side for a thin cutlet.
Curried cutlets of this kind belong to the long domestication of Indian cookery in the British kitchen, where "curry" came to mean a mildly spiced brown sauce built on onions, apple and stock rather than any particular regional dish. The apple and the commercial curry paste are the tell: by the time Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century, ready-made curry powders and pastes from firms selling into the domestic market had made the flavour a pantry staple, and cookery writers treated it as a sauce to be poured round almost anything cold mutton, hard-boiled eggs. That the sauce is offered in two strengths, with a gravy version for those who find the first too pungent, says a good deal about how cautious the average English palate of the period was assumed to be. Veal itself was then a far commoner meat in British households than it is now, and the leg is often said to have been the usual cut for anything cut into neat serving squares and crumbed.