Home › Steer Beef and Veal › Wiener Schnitzel
Wiener Schnitzel
Have little thin steaks cut by the butcher from loin of veal, and flattened with his meat cleaver. Rub with salt and pepper, dip in egg, then in flour and lastly in cracker crumbs. Fry in plenty butter. Sprinkle with lemon juice when done. Lay a lattice of anchovy filets across and sprinkle with a few capers. Both anchovies and capers enhance that outdoor tang, and they're easy to take along.
A camp version of the Viennese cutlet, written for a cook working over a fire with a skillet and whatever keeps well in a hamper. Two details decide whether it succeeds: the thickness of the meat and the heat of the fat.
- The hinge: pound thin, cook fastVeal loin cutlets should be beaten to about 1/4 inch, or a little under. At that thickness they cook through in roughly 2 minutes a side in hot fat; anything thicker either burns its coating or steams inside it.
- The breading orderAs written the sequence is egg, then flour, then crumbs. Standard practice is flour first, then egg, then crumbs, which is what makes the coating cling. If you follow the book literally, expect a patchier crust.
- Cracker crumbsPeriod cracker crumbs came from plain soda or water crackers, crushed fine. Unsalted saltines are the closest match; they brown faster than dry breadcrumbs, so watch the pan. Fine dry breadcrumbs are the Viennese original and are more forgiving.
- "Plenty butter"Whole butter at schnitzel heat will brown and speck. Clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, gives you the flavour without the burnt milk solids. Enough to come a third of the way up the cutlet is the right amount -- the coating should float and puff slightly.
- Salting before eggRub the salt and pepper on and breadcrumb immediately. Veal left sitting salted weeps moisture and the coating slides off in the pan.
- Anchovy and caperThis is the garnish of Schnitzel a la Holstein minus the fried egg. Use oil-packed anchovy fillets, patted dry, and rinse brined capers so they do not overpower the lemon. Both are salty, so go light on the salt in the initial seasoning.
- QuantityNo yield is given. Figure two cutlets of about 4 oz each per person, and fry in batches rather than crowding the pan -- crowded cutlets drop the fat temperature and go greasy.
Wiener Schnitzel is the veal cutlet of Vienna, breaded and fried in fat until the crust blisters away from the meat; the name means simply "Viennese cutlet," and Austrian law now restricts the term to veal, with pork versions sold under a different name. A long-repeated story traces the dish to Milanese cotoletta brought north by Field Marshal Radetzky in the 1850s, but that account is traditional rather than documented and food historians have largely set it aside. Its appearance in an outdoor-cooking book reflects how thoroughly the dish had entered American cookery by way of Central European immigration -- and the author's practical logic: a thin cutlet needs only a skillet and a few minutes, while anchovies and capers travel in their tins and jars without ice, supplying the sharp, salty note that a camp larder otherwise lacks.