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VEAL CUTLETS, FRIED (another way)
Cut a slice of lean veal about the third of an inch thick from the fillet. Divide this into neat cutlets convenient for serving. Prepare some finely-grated bread-crumbs, season with pepper, salt, and pounded mace, and add a table-spoonful of parsley which has been scalded and finely minced. Fry the cutlets in butter or dripping till they are cooked through and nicely browned, then serve as in the last recipe. Time to fry the cutlets, ten to fifteen minutes.
A plain Victorian breaded cutlet, written for a cook who already knew the drill — which is why the crumbing step is barely explained and the frying time is far too long for meat this thin.
- The missing stepThe recipe prepares seasoned crumbs but never says how they stick. Standard practice of the period was to brush each cutlet with beaten egg (or melted butter) before pressing it into the crumbs. Without that the coating falls into the pan.
- "Fillet" of vealIn British usage of this era the fillet is the leg, not the tenderloin. Ask for veal leg or top round cut into thin escalopes; a third of an inch is about 8 mm.
- TimingTen to fifteen minutes will turn an 8 mm cutlet grey and dry. Veal this thin needs roughly two to three minutes a side in hot fat — pull it as soon as the crumbs are deep gold and the juices run clear.
- Pounded maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg, warmer and less sweet. Ground mace from a jar is fine; use about a quarter teaspoon to a cup of crumbs, or substitute a slightly smaller quantity of grated nutmeg.
- Scalded parsleyPouring boiling water over the parsley before mincing fixes the colour and takes the raw edge off before it is mixed through the crumbs.
- Crumbs"Finely-grated bread-crumbs" means dry crumbs made from stale crustless bread, closer to fine dried crumbs than to panko. Sieve them if the texture is uneven.
- Frying fatDripping gives the better flavour and browns more reliably; butter alone will darken before the crumbs colour. Use clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, at a steady medium-high heat with the fat about 3 mm deep.
- "Serve as in the last recipe"The preceding recipe is not reproduced here; fried veal cutlets of this period were commonly sent up with a brown gravy, lemon and rolls of fried bacon. Any well-reduced pan gravy with lemon does the job.
- YieldRoughly 1 lb of veal gives four cutlets and serves two to three as a main course with potatoes and a green vegetable.
Cassell's gives the same dish several times over in slightly varied form — hence "another way" — such books being used as reference works rather than read through. The breaded veal cutlet itself sits in a long European family that includes the Milanese cotoletta and the Viennese schnitzel, and by the late nineteenth century the crumbed-and-fried treatment was thoroughly domesticated in British cooking. The use of pounded mace is a period marker: it was one of the standard English savoury spices for veal and forcemeat well into the nineteenth century, and appears to have receded from everyday use as nutmeg and pepper took over the shelf.