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Veal Cutlets, with Mushrooms
Take a slice or more of veal for cutlets from the fillet, and for every pound of veal allow a handful of mushrooms. Cleanse and trim them, and put them into a saucepan with a table-spoonful of lemon-juice, a table-spoonful of water, and a pinch of salt for one pound of mushrooms. Shake them in the liquor for a few minutes, then add a slice of fresh butter, put them on a clear fire, and let them remain for five minutes, shaking the saucepan occasionally. Turn them into a dish, cover closely, and leave them till wanted. Divide the veal into neat cutlets of a round or heart shape. Sprinkle a little pepper and salt upon them, and either dredge them with flour or egg and bread-crumb them, and fry them in butter or fat till they are equally and brightly browned. Put them on a plate, and keep them hot. Drain off half the fat in the pan, and mix a table-spoonful of flour smoothly with the remainder. Moisten gradually with a small tea-cupful of boiling stock or water, add the prepared mushrooms and a table-spoonful of ketchup. Let the sauce boil gently for three or four minutes. Put the fried cutlets on a dish alternately with slices of fried bacon or ham; place the mushrooms round, pour the sauce over all, and serve. Time to fry the cutlets, twelve to fifteen minutes.
A straightforward pan sauce built in the frying pan, but two words in it mean something different now: fillet and ketchup.
- "Fillet" of vealIn British butchery of this period the fillet is the leg, not the tenderloin. Buy leg cutlets or veal top round, about 1/2 inch thick; pounding thicker slices to an even thickness gives the "equally browned" result the recipe wants.
- Ketchup means mushroom ketchupIn a Victorian English kitchen an unqualified "ketchup" is mushroom or walnut ketchup — a thin, dark, salty condiment, often spiced and sometimes containing anchovy. Tomato ketchup will make the sauce sweet and pink. Use mushroom ketchup, or substitute a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce or soy for the same savoury depth.
- QuantitiesA handful of mushrooms per pound of veal is roughly 4 oz; the salt-and-lemon instruction is scaled for a full pound, so scale it down accordingly. A "small tea-cupful" of stock is somewhere under a quarter-pint — call it 4 fl oz (about 120 ml).
- Frying timeTwelve to fifteen minutes suits the thick cutlets and slow coal-range pans of the period. Half-inch cutlets are done in 3-4 minutes per side; take them to an internal 145F and rest them. Overcooked veal turns dry and stringy very quickly.
- The mushroom pre-cookSweating the mushrooms in lemon juice, water and salt before the butter keeps them pale and firm and draws out liquor that later enriches the sauce. Do not skip it and add raw mushrooms to the pan sauce — they will release water and thin it.
- Building the saucePouring off half the fat is the important step: the remaining fat should just about match the tablespoon of flour. If you have egg-and-crumbed the cutlets, the pan will hold burnt crumbs — strain or wipe them out first, or the sauce will taste scorched.
- Yield and servingA pound of veal gives four modest cutlets, enough for two to three with the bacon or ham slices. Plain boiled potatoes or rice take the sauce well.
Veal cutlets with a butter-and-flour pan sauce are an English domestic dish, and the method here — sear, pour off surplus fat, cook flour in what remains, moisten gradually with hot stock — is the same brown pan sauce the book applies to a dozen other meats. Mushrooms were a natural partner, whether fresh or in the preserved form of the mushroom ketchup that appears at the end of the sauce; that condiment is generally reckoned to predate tomato ketchup in Britain. The bacon or ham laid alternately with the cutlets is doing real work rather than decoration, since milk-fed veal is lean and mild and needs the salt and fat of cured pork to carry it.