Veal Cutlets
Choose only the tenderest of veal for cutlets. Cut meat from leg, shape either in individual cutlets or one large cutlet. Cover veal with oil and let it stand one hour. Drain; cover with boiling water and simmer until tender, having only sufficient water in stewpan to keep cutlets from burning. Remove from stewpan; cool; sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, dip in egg and crumbs, and sauté in pork fat or fry in deep fat.
Serve on hot platter with brown sauce, tomato sauce or mushroom sauce.
Loin of Veal à la Jardinière a 6-pound loin of veal 1 cup salt pork cubes 1 cup potatoes 1 cup carrots 2 cups green peas 1 cauliflower 1 cup onion 4 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour salt, pepper and lemon juice Remove the bone from veal; wipe meat, and season with salt and pepper. Roll and tie in shape.
Cook bones in water to cover, one hour. Melt butter; add vegetables, except potatoes, peas and cauliflower; cook five minutes. Try out salt pork; add veal, and brown. Place veal in dripping pan; surround with pork fat, onion and carrot, and cook three hours. To the melted butter add flour. When well blended, add water in which bones were cooked.
Season with salt, pepper and lemon juice. Cook cauliflower, peas and potatoes separately in boiling salted . water. Place cooked meat in center of platter, pour over sauce, and arrange vegetables in mounds around the meat.
Two dishes run together here: breaded veal cutlets, and a boned, rolled loin served à la jardinière. Both assume a coal range and a cook who knows what a dripping pan is doing without a dial.
- The pre-simmer is the odd stepModern practice cuts leg veal thin and sautés it in three or four minutes; the instruction to simmer first suggests the cut was expected to need tenderising. If your cutlets are thin scaloppine, skip the water entirely — seasoning, flour, egg, crumbs, and straight into the fat. Reserve the simmer for thick, sinewy slices.
- "Cover veal with oil"An hour in oil appears to be a tenderising and moistening step rather than a marinade in the modern sense: there is no acid or aromatic in it. The book gives no quantity, and 'cover' is ambiguous; a coating of neutral oil is the likeliest reading, and there is no need to submerge the meat.
- Pork fat and deep fatLard, or fat rendered from salt pork, is what the book intends and it browns crumbs beautifully. Any neutral oil at 350–365F works for the deep-fried version; the crumb coat needs only two to three minutes since the meat is already cooked through.
- "Try out salt pork"Render the cubes slowly in the pan until the fat runs and the cubes are golden. That fat, not butter, is what browns the loin.
- The missing oven temperatureThe book gives none. Three hours for a six-pound boned loin implies a moderate oven; in modern terms around 325F is a reasonable equivalent. At that temperature a rolled loin will be well past done; check with a thermometer and pull it at 145–150F, which will take closer to two hours. Veal loin is lean and dries out hard.
- The vegetables are two separate operationsOnion and carrot go into the roasting pan as aromatics and are effectively spent by the end. The potatoes, peas and cauliflower are boiled separately and arranged as the garnish — that arrangement in mounds is the whole point of jardinière.
- The sauceButter and flour cooked together, then let down with the bone broth: a plain velouté. Four tablespoons each to the liquid from the bones will give a coating sauce for about two cups. Skim the roasting pan and add its juices for better flavor; the lemon juice goes in at the end.
- YieldA six-pound loin with that quantity of vegetables serves eight to ten. The cutlets are portioned by eye — figure five to six ounces of trimmed veal per person.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored books of the 1900s it surrounded its promotional chocolate chapters with a full general cookery course in the Boston Cooking School manner — hence the brisk, measured, unsentimental prose here. À la jardinière — "in the gardener's style" — is a French garnish term for a joint ringed with separately cooked vegetables, each kept distinct in color and shape rather than stewed together, and its appearance in a Boston household book shows how far the vocabulary of the professional French kitchen had filtered into domestic American cooking by 1907.