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Venetian Cutlets
Chop finely and separately, then all together, half a pint of mushrooms, two shallots, a little parsley, and a sprig of thyme. Mix them thoroughly and stew them for ten minutes over a slow fire in a little butter, with a slice of fat bacon cut into dice. Sprinkle a little pepper over two pounds of veal cutlets, put them into the saucepan, and cook them gently till quite tender. Add a gill of white stock by degrees while cooking. Draw the saucepan from the fire for a minute or two; then thicken the sauce with the well-beaten yolks of three eggs mixed with a gill of hot cream. The sauce must not boil after the eggs are added. Before serving, squeeze in the juice of a lemon. The meat will require about an hour's cooking. Add salt to taste when nearly done. Probable cost, 3s.
A veal braise finished with an egg-and-cream liaison, in the French manner despite the name. Everything hangs on the last two minutes.
- The hinge: the sauce must not boilOnce the yolks and cream go in, hold the pan off direct heat and stir constantly; the sauce thickens between about 160 and 175F and scrambles above that. Return it to the lowest possible flame only if it refuses to coat a spoon.
- Add the lemon last, and off the heatAcid poured into a hot yolk sauce will tighten it and can split it. Take the pan right off the stove, stir in the juice, then serve. Half a lemon is often enough for a gill of cream.
- A gillIn this British book a gill is 5 fluid ounces, about 142 ml — not the 4-ounce American gill. So a little over half a US cup of stock, and the same again of cream.
- Half a pint of mushroomsA volume measure, half an imperial pint being 10 fl oz; the text does not say whether the mushrooms are measured before or after chopping, so reckon on roughly 3 to 5 oz by weight. Chopped fine with shallot, parsley and thyme and stewed in butter, this is close to a duxelles.
- Veal cutletsIn Victorian English books "veal cutlets" often meant slices cut from the leg or loin rather than bone-in rib chops, though usage varied. An hour of gentle braising suits thick slices from the leg; thin escalopes would be dry in twenty minutes, so buy the cutlets a good three-quarters of an inch thick.
- Fat baconFat streaky bacon or pancetta, cut into dice, is the closest thing; what the recipe is after is rendered fat and a little salt. The text does not say whether the bacon was smoked.
- White stockAn unroasted veal or chicken stock. A pale, low-salt chicken stock is the practical substitute — note that salt is deliberately withheld until the end, because the bacon and the reduction both concentrate.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of veal serves four to six. Serve the cutlets on a warmed dish with the sauce spooned over, since the liaison will not sit or reheat.
- Probable costThree shillings, the price Cassell's gives for the whole dish. It marks this as a middling household's company dish rather than an everyday one.
Cassell's borrowed its dish names freely from the French repertoire, and "Venetian" here does not correspond to anything documented in Venice. The substance of the recipe is thoroughly French: a duxelles of mushroom, shallot and herbs stewed in butter, a braise moistened by degrees with white stock, and a liaison of yolks and cream sharpened with lemon at the last moment — the same technique that finishes a blanquette or a fricassée. Veal was the natural meat for it, being mild enough not to colour the sauce, and in a period when English cooks were being urged toward French method it appears often in books of this kind. The costing in shillings at the end of each entry is a Cassell's habit, meant to let a housekeeper judge a dish before she committed to it.