George M Cohan
STEAMED VEAL
1½ pounds veal cutlet 1 egg 1 pint milk 1 tablespoonful flour 1 tablespoonful butter Cracker- or bread-crumbs Order the veal cut in thin slices and then divide it into pieces suitable for individual service. Beat the egg slightly, add salt and pepper to it, and dip in the veal; then roll in cracker crumbs, brown in butter or any desired fat, sprinkle with a little more salt and pepper, and place in a pan which will fit into the steamer. Make a cream sauce of the butter, flour, and milk, and add to it a few grains of baking soda. Pour over the veal and steam for two hours.
A breaded veal cutlet finished by steaming in cream sauce — a method that reads oddly now but was standard for tenderizing veal in the days when "cutlet" often meant a thin slice off the shoulder or round rather than the loin.
- The stray word at the top"KOLACHES" appears to be a stray from the typesetting, most likely carried over from a neighbouring recipe. Nothing in the ingredients or method calls for a sweet dough; ignore it.
- The veal quantity is broken"1/2 pounds veal cutlet" looks like a printer's error; the plural "pounds" points to a missing numeral, most likely 1 1/2 pounds, which sits better with a pint of milk. Read it as roughly 1 1/2 lb and do not try to make the sauce quantity fit half a pound.
- The pinch of soda is the hingeA few grains of baking soda go into the cream sauce to help keep the milk from curdling over two hours of moist heat. Use a genuine pinch — much more than that gives a soapy taste and dulls the colour of the sauce.
- Sauce proportions are thinner than modern practiceOne tablespoon each of flour and butter to a pint of milk is a very loose sauce by today's standards, closer to enriched milk than a béchamel. If you want a thicker result, or shorten the cooking, use two tablespoons of each.
- Two hours suits tough veal, not modern cutletsSupermarket veal scallopini is thin and tender and will be shredded and dry long before two hours. The timing makes sense for a thicker slice off the shoulder or round; with true thin cutlets, 30 to 40 minutes of gentle steaming is enough to set the sauce and no more.
- The steamerThis means a covered pot with a rack above simmering water, or a large pan with a fitted insert — not a pressure cooker. The sauce stays in the pan, so any deep pan with a lid, set on a trivet in a larger pot, does the job.
- Expect the crust to go softThe crumb coating is browned for flavour, not crispness; steaming under sauce will soften it entirely. Brown it well in the butter first so that colour and taste survive.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; it says only to divide the veal into pieces suitable for individual service. A green vegetable and boiled or mashed potato would suit, with the sauce standing in for gravy.
Steamed or "smothered" veal cutlet in cream sauce was a workhorse of American cookbooks in the era when veal was cheap urban butcher's meat and often tough enough to need long, wet cooking. The trick of adding a few grains of baking soda to a milk sauce held over prolonged heat appears throughout domestic-science-era writing, where soda was the cheap fix for curdling. Celebrity cookbooks like this one collected such contributions by the dozen; the dishes are usually far plainer than the names attached to them, since what a performer actually ate between shows was rarely spectacular. Cohan (1878 u20131942) came out of a vaudeville family act.