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Breaded Veal Cutlets
6 tender veal cutlets. 1 egg. 1/2 cup crumbs. Salt and pepper. Trim cutlets neatly, salt and pepper, dip in crumbs, then in egg and again in crumbs and fry slowly until done.
Serve with tomato sauce. Cutlets are nice served with chestnut sauce. Boil chestnuts and run through sieve, add 1 pt. of white sauce, season highly.
A skeletal recipe of the kind Mrs. Wilson wrote for cooks who already knew the drill. The gaps worth filling are the pan, the fat and the doneness.
- What a "cutlet" meantIn 1920 this would generally have been a slice from the leg or loin, likely nearer 1/2 inch thick than the paper-thin scaloppine sold today. Modern veal cutlets are often already pounded to 1/4 inch, which cooks in two to three minutes a side and will dry out if you follow the instruction to fry slowly until done.
- No fat is namedThe recipe assumes you have lard, drippings or butter at hand and does not say how much. Use enough clarified butter or neutral oil to film the pan generously, about 1/8 inch, and keep it at a steady medium heat so the crumbs brown before the meat overcooks.
- Crumbs, egg, crumbsThe double crumbing is deliberate. The first coat of dry crumbs presumably gives the egg something to grip, so the crust is less likely to slide off in the pan. Beat the egg with a spoonful of water to thin it.
- Half a cup is not enoughHalf a cup of crumbs will not coat six cutlets twice over. Set out a cup and a half of fine dry breadcrumbs and discard what is left, since it will be egg-fouled.
- DonenessVeal is cooked to 145F and rested; there is no reason to take it further, and thin cutlets will pass that mark almost as soon as the second side browns. Rest the fried cutlets on a rack, not paper, or the crust steams.
- The chestnut sauceA pint of white sauce is a lot for six cutlets and the chestnut puree thickens it further, so thin with stock or milk to a pouring consistency. Peeled cooked chestnuts, vacuum-packed or frozen, save the boiling and peeling, though they still need to be sieved or pureed; season with plenty of salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg, as "season highly" instructs.
- YieldSix cutlets serve four to six depending on thickness. Both sauces are made separately, so make them while the crumbed cutlets chill on a rack.
Breaded veal has been the plainest possible entry in English-language cookbooks since the nineteenth century, a dish often said to be a domesticated cousin of the Viennese schnitzel and the Milanese cotoletta -- though that lineage is much argued -- and by Mrs. Wilson's day it needed no explanation at all -- hence three lines of instruction. Veal was cheap and common in American cities then, a by-product of the dairy trade, and appears far more often in books of this period than it does in ours. What is characteristic of Mrs. Wilson is the second half of the entry: rather than stop at tomato sauce she offers chestnut sauce, a genteel touch generally traced to the French kitchen, where chestnut puree is said to have been common autumn and winter fare. Her recipes were written first for newspaper readers during and just after the First World War, which accounts for the compression: column space was short, and she assumed a reader who could infer the frying pan and the fat for herself.