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Veal Cutlets
Use slices of veal from leg cut one-half inch thick. Wipe, remove bone and skin, then cut in pieces for serving. The long, irregular-shaped pieces may be rolled, and fastened with small wooden skewers. Sprinkle with salt and pepper; dip in flour, egg, and crumbs; fry slowly, until well browned, in salt pork fat or butter; then remove cutlets to stewpan and pour over one and one-half cups Brown Sauce. Place on back of range and cook slowly forty minutes, or until cutlets are tender.
Veal may be cooked first in boiling water until tender, then crumbed and fried. The water in which veal was cooked may be used for sauce. Arrange on hot platter, strain sauce and pour around cutlets, and garnish with parsley.
Brown Sauce. Brown three tablespoons butter, add three tablespoons flour, and stir until well browned. Add gradually one and one-half cups stock or water, or half stock and half stewed and strained tomatoes. Season with salt, pepper, lemon juice, and Worcestershire Sauce. The trimmings from veal (including skin and bones) may be covered with one and one-half cups cold water, allowed to heat slowly to boiling-point, then cooked, strained, and used for sauce.
A braised breaded cutlet in the Fannie Farmer style: brown first, then finish slowly in brown sauce. Two details do the work — a gentle fry so the crumbs colour without burning, and a low, long braise rather than a hard simmer.
- The hinge: fry slowlyEgg-and-crumb coating over veal needs medium heat, not high. If the fat is hot enough to spit, the crumbs blacken before the meat browns, and the burnt crust then flavours the whole sauce during the braise.
- "Back of the range"On a coal range the area away from the firebox ran cooler, and was used for holding things at a bare simmer. Translate as the lowest burner setting for the forty minutes.
- Cut of meatHalf-inch slices from the leg are what a butcher now sells as veal cutlets or round steak; ask for them unpounded. Boneless leg or shoulder cut to the same thickness also works, though shoulder wants closer to an hour.
- Salt pork fatRendered fat from diced salt pork is one of the frying mediums this book uses often. Bacon fat, clarified butter or half butter and half neutral oil all substitute; plain butter alone will brown fast, so watch it.
- Brown sauce proportionsThree tablespoons each of butter and flour to a cup and a half of liquid gives a fairly thick sauce that thins as it takes up meat juices. Brown the roux to the colour of a hazelnut shell -- this is where the flavour comes from, and it will take several minutes of steady stirring.
- The trimmings stockSimmering bones and skin in only a cup and a half of cold water for the sauce is worth doing; veal bones are prized for the gelatine they give. Start cold, as directed, and skim before straining.
- The pre-boiling variantThe alternative method — poach the veal tender, then crumb and fry — is faster to finish but gives paler, blander meat. The braise builds more flavour.
- SkewersSmall wooden skewers are toothpicks or short bamboo skewers. Pull them before saucing and serving, or they get lost under the gravy.
- YieldAssume about 1 1/2 lb of veal for four servings, with the full quantity of sauce given.
The method is the plain American reading of a French braise: brown, then finish slowly in a flour-thickened brown sauce, a simplified relative of sauce espagnole made without the long-simmered stock and mirepoix, built instead from whatever the trimmings will yield. The Worcestershire and lemon juice at the end are typical period correctives, added to give a flour gravy some of the depth a reduced stock would have supplied. Veal was comparatively cheap in the dairying regions around Boston, bull calves being a by-product of milk production, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s treat it as an everyday meat in a way that would be hard to afford now.