Three Shalots
One wineglass of Sherry.
One gill of Madeira Sauce.
Cayenne. Lemon Juice.
Parsley. Potatoes. Croûte of Bread.
Cut the veal into eight slices, flatten, trim, and season with pepper and salt. Put two ounces of butter and two tablespoonfuls of sweet oil into a sauté-pan; when hot put in the fillets, and fry them over a quick fire on both sides; drain the fillets and put them on a plate. Pour off most of the fat in the sauté-pan, add three finely chopped shalots, fry a little, dilute with a small glass of sherry and rather more than a gill of Madeira sauce; boil for a few minutes, add a pinch of cayenne, a few drops of lemon juice, and a teaspoonful of chopped parsley; stir well, and work in an ounce and a half of fresh butter. Put the fillets into this sauce and mix them well with it, but do not let it boil again. Dish the fillets in a circle, place a heart-shaped slice of fried bread between each fillet. Fill the centre with small round potatoes (Pommes de terre à la Parisienne, page 107), sprinkle with a little chopped parsley, pour the sauce over the fillets, and serve.
A plainly classical veal sauté — the ingredient list at the head is incomplete (no veal, butter or oil is listed, and the title names only the shalots), so read the method for the real quantities. A few of the terms need translating.
- The meat, despite the section headingThe meat -- The method calls for veal cut into eight slices and flattened — these are escalopes cut from the fillet or a boned loin, about 2 oz each. Around a pound of veal will give eight slices; pound them thin.
- The hinge: no boiling once the butter goes inThe final ounce and a half of butter is worked into the reduced sauce to thicken and gloss it; the recipe does not specify off the heat, only that the pan must not return to a boil, which would split the emulsion and leave a greasy, thin sauce.
- Gill and wineglassA gill is 5 fl oz in British measure (about ⅔ cup); "rather more than a gill" means roughly ¾ cup of sauce. A wineglass in this period is about 2 fl oz — a modern glass of wine holds three times as much.
- Madeira sauceNot a bottled product: it is espagnole or a good brown stock reduction finished with Madeira. A well-reduced veal or beef stock glace loosened with Madeira gives the same body without making a full mother sauce.
- Sweet oilOlive oil. Mixed with the butter it keeps the butter from burning over a quick fire. Any neutral oil serves the same purpose.
- Quick fireHigh heat — the pan should be hot enough to colour the escalopes in 1 to 2 minutes a side. Thin veal cooks through in that time; longer and it turns dry and stringy.
- Pommes de terre à la ParisiennePotato balls scooped out with a parisienne cutter (melon baller) and fried or tossed in butter until golden. Use waxy potatoes so the spheres hold shape.
- CroûtesHeart-shaped slices of bread fried until crisp. Cut them before frying, and keep them uncovered so they do not soften before serving.
- YieldEight fillets serves four as a main course, or eight as one course of a longer menu of the kind this book assumes.
The dish belongs to the late-nineteenth-century Anglo-French repertoire that professional cooks in Britain worked from: a veal escalope seared hard, a pan deglazed with sherry and a Madeira-based brown sauce, butter beaten in at the end, and the whole thing built up on the dish in a ring with croûtes and a garnish in the centre. That circular presentation, called dressing en couronne, was standard for entrées of small cut pieces and was as much of the recipe as the cooking. Shallots — "shalots" being one of the common nineteenth-century spellings — were the standard aromatic for such pan sauces, milder and more quickly cooked than onion. The heading "Three Shalots" reads less like the name of a dish than like a fragment of the ingredient list caught as a title. The stray placement in the Fish section, and the ingredient list that omits the veal entirely, remain unexplained.