Valentine Grant
BREADED VEAL CUTLETS
Use slices cut from leg. Remove bone and cut in pieces for serving. Beat an egg, mix with it a little parsley, picked fine, salt and pepper and, if desired, a little grated lemon rind. Dip cutlets in mixture, then coat with bread crumbs and fry in salt pork fat or butter. Pour over cutlets brown sauce.
Sincerely yours,
A plain schnitzel-style cutlet, written for a cook who already knew what breading and brown sauce meant. The gaps are the ones a 1916 contributor assumed you could fill.
- The cutSlices from the leg are what a butcher now sells as veal cutlets or scallopini. Ask for them cut across the grain from the top round, then pound to about 1/4 inch between sheets of plastic so they cook through before the crumbs darken.
- Add a flour stepThe recipe goes straight from egg to crumbs, which is why breading often slides off. Pat the meat dry, dust it in seasoned flour, then egg, then crumbs; press the crumbs on and let the cutlets rest ten minutes before frying.
- Bread crumbsDry, fine crumbs from stale bread, not the seasoned sand sold in canisters. Panko works and browns more evenly, though it gives a coarser crust than the period intended.
- Salt pork fatRender diced salt pork slowly and pour off the clear fat, or substitute clarified butter or a neutral oil with a knob of butter added near the end. Whole butter, as the recipe allows, can brown and burn if the pan gets hot, so keep the heat moderate or clarify it first.
- TimingPounded cutlets need only about two to three minutes a side in fat at moderately high heat, to an internal 145F. Veal this thin dries out quickly, and long frying is the usual reason breaded cutlets turn tough.
- "Brown sauce"In a 1916 kitchen this meant a flour-and-butter roux cooked to a nut brown and moistened with meat stock, sometimes with a little onion or tomato. Deglazing the frying pan with stock and thickening lightly gets you the same thing without a separate saucepan; keep it thin so the crust does not go soft.
- Lemon rindThe optional grated rind in the egg is worth including, and a wedge of lemon at the table is the older habit still kept with schnitzel. It does the same work as the sauce from the other direction.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 lb of veal, or six thin cutlets, serves four. Fry in batches with room between the pieces; crowding steams the breading.
Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries (1916) collected recipes solicited from stage and screen performers, each signed off as if it were a fan letter, which is why this one trails away into "Sincerely yours." Valentine Grant was an American silent-film actress who worked frequently with the director Sidney Olcott, whom she married. The dish itself is the Central European breaded cutlet, generally traced to the Austrian Wiener Schnitzel and its Milanese cousin, absorbed into American cooking through German and Austrian immigrant kitchens in the nineteenth century; by 1916 breaded veal cutlets with brown sauce were standard hotel and boarding-house fare, which is rather the point of these books. The celebrity supplied the name, not the novelty.