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Veal Cutlets, with Maitre D'Hotel Butter
For one pound of cutlets prepare maitre d'hotel butter as follows. Wash and pick a bunch of parsley, chop small, wrap it in the corner of a cloth, dip it in cold spring water, and wring the moisture from it. Put it into a basin with its bulk in fresh butter, a few drops of strained lemon-juice, and a little pepper and salt. Work it with the point of a knife till the butter is like cream, and be very careful to keep the butter in a cool place, for if melted it will be oily. Trim and broil some veal cutlets in the usual way (see VEAL CUTLETS, BROILED, PLAIN). Put the butter on a dish, place the cutlets upon it, and serve very hot.
A compound butter and a grilled chop, both of which live or die on temperature control. Two things need attention: the butter must never soften past creamy, and the veal must not be cooked past pink-tinged juices.
- Keep the butter coldThe instruction to work it with a knife point until it is "like cream" means creamed, not melted. Butter that breaks and goes oily will not sit under the cutlets as a sauce; it will pool as fat. Work it on a cool surface and refrigerate until needed.
- Wringing the parsleyChopped parsley holds a lot of water, and the rinse-and-squeeze in a cloth removes it so the butter does not go wet and streaky. It is worth doing rather than skipping.
- "Its bulk in fresh butter"Equal volume of butter to chopped parsley, which gives a very green, very herbaceous butter. Modern compound-butter ratios are usually far less parsley-heavy, so scale to taste; but the original ratio is not a misprint.
- "Broil" means grillIn a British book of this period broiling is cooking on a gridiron over live coals. Use an overhead broiler on high, a ridged grill pan, or a charcoal grill — a heat source hot enough to colour the surface in a few minutes per side.
- Veal cutlets, and how far to cook themThese are chops or thick slices, not the paper-thin escalopes sold as veal cutlets today; the recipe does not specify the cut or thickness. Grill to an internal 145F (63C) and rest briefly; a Victorian "well done" veal cutlet is dry and grey.
- Serve on a hot dishThe butter is meant to melt under the hot meat and mix with the juices, so warm the serving dish first. Cutlets set on cold butter will simply sit on a slab of it.
- YieldOne pound of cutlets serves two, or three at a lighter meal. The compound butter keeps a week refrigerated, or months rolled in parchment and frozen.
Maître d'hôtel butter takes its name, by conventional attribution, from the head of the household staff — the steward who ran the dining room — and belongs to the family of French compound butters that entered English cookery through professional kitchens in the nineteenth century. It is the plainest of them: parsley, lemon, salt and pepper worked into butter, with no cooking at all. Its usefulness lay in giving a grilled chop or a piece of fish something to sit in. The same preparation, unchanged in substance, is still a common finish for a grilled steak in French practice.