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Veal Cutlets
3 cups ground Veal. 1 small cup thick white sauce, highly seasoned. Add a little minced onion, if desired. Mould into pear shape, then flatten until they are 1 inch thick, dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs and fry. Before frying, insert a piece of spaghetti an inch long in small end to look like a bone, serve with mushroom or oyster sauce.
This is a croquette dressed up as a chop: cooked ground veal bound with a stiff white sauce, breaded and fried. The recipe assumes you already know the croquette method, so the two things it leaves out are the two that decide whether it works.
- The veal is already cookedThe veal is almost certainly already cooked -- the recipe does not say so, but a mixture bound with thick white sauce and briefly fried is the standard treatment for the remains of a roast or a braised shoulder put through the grinder. Raw ground veal will not hold this shape and will weep in the pan.
- How thick is thick white sauceCroquette-strength béchamel, roughly 4 tablespoons butter and 4 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk, cooked until it pulls away from the pan in a mass. An ordinary pouring white sauce will give you a mixture that collapses in the fat.
- Chill before shapingSpread the mixture on a plate and refrigerate until firm, at least two hours, before moulding. This is the hinge of the recipe and Mrs. Wilson does not mention it; warm croquette paste splits its coating and bursts.
- The coating order"Crumbs, egg and crumbs" is deliberate. The first light dusting of dry crumbs gives the beaten egg something to grip, and the second coat seals it. Let the breaded cutlets rest 20 minutes in the refrigerator before frying.
- FryingThe recipe says only 'fry' and does not specify the method. If you deep-fry, 375F for three to four minutes, turning once, suits; the interior is already cooked, so you are heating through and colouring the crust. A slack pan of fat soaks the crumbs and nothing browns.
- The spaghetti bonePurely decorative, and it will fry hard and brittle. Use a dry piece, push it in far enough to hold, and expect to remove it at the table rather than eat it. A paper cutlet frill does the same job with less risk to a tooth.
- Seasoning"Highly seasoned" is doing real work. Cooked veal is bland and the sauce is the only carrier for salt, pepper, nutmeg or lemon; taste the paste before you chill it, since you cannot correct it afterwards.
- YieldThree cups of meat with a cup of sauce should give roughly eight cutlets at the stated 1 inch thick, enough for about four with a sauce and a vegetable. The recipe itself states no yield.
Mrs. Wilson's book belongs to the era just after the First World War, when American home economists were still writing under the influence of food conservation campaigns, and this dish is a textbook example of the mock-chop genre: cooked scraps ground fine, bound with panade or thick béchamel, and moulded to imitate the expensive cut they replace. The trick of inserting a length of macaroni or spaghetti to stand in for the bone is often said to have circulated in cookery writing on both sides of the Atlantic, alongside frilled paper cuffs and skewers, and it says a good deal about a period in which presenting food in the shape of something grander was considered a legitimate part of the cook's craft rather than a deception. The mushroom or oyster sauce is the conventional finish for veal in this tradition.