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Cutlets for Breakfast
Cut a cutlet of veal into pieces about two inches square, and season with salt and pepper. Dip first into beaten egg, then into chopped mushrooms. Put two tablespoonfuls of butter in a frying pan, and, when hot, fry the cutlets until brown. Make a brown sauce the same as for veal cutlets, pour over the squares, and serve.
A brisk pan-fry that assumes you already know how to make a brown sauce and that "a cutlet of veal" means a single large slice, not a chop. A few points close the gaps.
- What a cutlet is hereIn this period "veal cutlet" usually meant a boneless slice, often cut from the leg and around half an inch thick — close to what a butcher now sells as veal scallops or leg steak — though the word was also used for bone-in chops. The recipe gives no quantity; buy enough for your table and cut it into two-inch squares as directed.
- The mushroom coating is the hingeChop the mushrooms very fine and, if they are watery, squeeze them in a towel first. Wet, coarse mushroom will slide off the egg in the pan and steam rather than brown. Press the pieces on firmly and fry without crowding.
- Butter alone will burnTwo tablespoons of whole butter over the heat needed to brown veal will blacken before the meat colours. Use clarified butter, or half butter and half a neutral oil, and wipe the pan between batches if the mushroom scraps darken.
- DonenessSquares this size need only about two minutes a side. Veal is properly cooked at 145F with a short rest; taken further it turns dry and stringy.
- Brown sauceThe cross-reference is to the book's own brown sauce, which in books of this kind usually means a browned flour-and-butter roux moistened with veal or beef stock and simmered down. A quick pan sauce works in its place: deglaze the frying pan with stock, reduce, and finish with a lump of butter.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantity, so the yield depends entirely on the size of the cutlet you buy. Serve the squares overlapped on a warm platter with the sauce poured over at the last moment, or the coating softens.
- Why it suits hot weatherEverything happens on the stovetop in under ten minutes, with no oven lit.
Cookbooks of hot-weather and summer cookery did appear in the late nineteenth century, written for households where a coal range turned the kitchen into an oven in summer; their argument is speed, small quantities and the frying pan over the roasting oven. Veal suited that brief: mild, quick-cooking, and sold in thin slices that needed only minutes. The instruction to "make a brown sauce the same as for veal cutlets" is the period's normal shorthand, the sauce chapter being assumed knowledge. Breakfast in such a household was often still a cooked meal with meat on the table, which is why a fried veal dish with mushrooms and a made sauce reads here as an ordinary morning rather than a special one.