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Veal Cutlets, Fried
Take the cutlets from the best end of the neck, and let them be about half an inch thick. Trim them neatly, flatten with a cleaver, and flour well. Fry them in butter or good dripping until they are cooked through. When brown on one side turn them upon the other. Pour away the fat, and dissolve a slice of fresh butter in the pan, stir a dessert-spoonful of flour into this, and when it is quite smooth and brown add very gradually a cupful of boiling gravy which has been made by stewing the trimmings of the veal very gently for an hour or more with a little water, a small roll of lemon-rind, an onion, half a blade of mace, a sprig of parsley and thyme, and a little pepper and salt. This sauce may, if liked, be flavoured with a little lemon-juice or walnut pickle, or with a few mushrooms. Some people would scarcely care for veal cutlets unless they were accompanied by mushroom sauce. Serve the cutlets on a hot dish with the sauce poured over. A few fried forcemeat balls and some fried rashers of bacon should be served with them. The veal may be taken from the fillet instead of the neck, and then the meat should be cut into neat round pieces convenient for serving. Time to fry cutlets, about fifteen minutes. Probable cost, from 1s. to 1s. 4d. per pound.
A straightforward pan-fry with a pan gravy built on veal-trimming stock. The recipe assumes you will start the stock before you start the cutlets, so read to the end before lighting the stove.
- Make the gravy firstThe "cupful of boiling gravy" is a stock simmered from the trimmings for an hour or more with lemon rind, onion, mace, parsley and thyme. Set that going before you fry, since the sauce is finished in the hot pan and cannot wait an hour. Light chicken or veal stock with a strip of lemon peel and a pinch of mace is an honest substitute.
- Cut and thicknessThe "best end of the neck" is the rib end, sold now as veal rib chops or rack; half an inch is thinner than most butchers cut, so ask or slice the meat off the bone yourself. The fillet variant means the leg, cut into rounds - what a modern shop calls veal cutlets or scaloppine, though those are usually thinner still.
- Flatten, do not shredA cleaver flat-side works, but a heavy pan or mallet between two sheets of plastic is easier on the fibres. The point is even thickness so the whole cutlet finishes at once.
- Fifteen minutes is for the thick cutHalf-inch neck cutlets on the bone will take roughly that time over moderate heat. Thin leg rounds are done in three or four minutes a side; hold them longer and veal, which is very lean, turns dry and grey. Cook to about 145-150F and rest briefly.
- Dripping and butter"Good dripping" is the fat rendered from roasting meat, most often beef; beef dripping is still sold and is easily saved at home. Butter alone will darken before the meat is through, so use half butter and half a neutral fat, or clarified butter, for the frying, keeping fresh butter for the sauce.
- The roux stageA dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons. Cook the flour in the butter until it smells nutty and turns light brown before adding liquid, and add the hot stock a little at a time - this is a standard brown pan sauce, and adding the liquid gradually while stirring is what keeps it smooth.
- Walnut picklePickled walnuts and their liquor were a common savoury sharpener in Victorian kitchens and are still made in Britain. A dash of Worcestershire sauce or mushroom ketchup gives a similar dark, salty acidity if you have none.
- Forcemeat ballsThe book assumes the reader knows these: seasoned breadcrumb-and-suet or veal stuffing rolled small and fried. The recipe asks for both them and the fried bacon rashers, so treat the bacon as part of the dish rather than a garnish; the lean veal wants the fat.
- YieldThe book gives no yield. As a rough guide, allow one thick neck cutlet or two fillet rounds per person; the cupful of sauce will stretch across several servings.
Veal held a high place in nineteenth-century English cookery because it was mild and pale - a "delicate" meat suited to the sauces and forcemeats that defined genteel dining. The insistence here that the cutlets be served with bacon and a made gravy is not decoration but necessity: veal carries almost no fat of its own, and English practice often paired it with pork in one form or another, from bacon rashers to suet forcemeat. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, one of a family of Cassell cookery dictionaries issued and reissued from the 1870s onwards, gave prices per pound as a matter of course, and the shilling to one-and-fourpence quoted places veal above the cheaper cuts of beef and mutton - a dish for a household that could afford to spend an hour stewing trimmings for a single cupful of gravy.