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Breaded Veal Cutlets with Tomato Sauce
Roll the cutlets in fine crumbs, salted and peppered; dip into beaten egg, then again in crumbs. Set on ice until firm, and fry. Cook slowly after the first five minutes. Underdone veal is unwholesome and unpalatable. Serve with tomato sauce.
A bare-bones method that assumes you know how to shallow-fry in a heavy skillet. Two details carry the dish: the chilling step and the two-stage heat.
- Chill the breading"Set on ice until firm" means chill the breaded cutlets until the coating sets, which in a modern refrigerator takes roughly half an hour. This helps the egg-and-crumb coat stay on the meat rather than in the pan.
- The two-stage fryFive minutes over fairly brisk heat to colour both sides, then drop the heat and let the cutlets finish gently. Thin cutlets need only a few minutes more; anything thicker will take longer, so judge by doneness rather than the clock.
- "Underdone veal is unwholesome"Period cooks believed veal had to be cooked through on health grounds. Modern guidance for whole cuts of veal is 145F with a three-minute rest, which still gives a firm, opaque cutlet — the book's intent — without drying it out.
- Fat for fryingThe recipe never says what to fry in; lard, drippings and butter were all period options. Butter alone will brown too fast over the first high-heat stage; use clarified butter or half butter, half neutral oil, about a quarter inch deep.
- Fine crumbsNot modern coarse panko. Dry white breadcrumbs, sieved fine, give a smooth even crust.
- Season at every stageThe recipe seasons the crumbs but not the meat. Season the cutlets themselves as well, since the coating passes little seasoning inward.
- Tomato sauceNo sauce recipe is given here. Any simple cooked tomato sauce, loose enough to pool on the plate, suits the dish.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; figure a cutlet per person, fried in batches so the pan never crowds and steams.
Breaded veal cutlets reached American cookbooks by more than one route: the French *côtelette de veau panée* of professional kitchens and the German and Austrian schnitzel of nineteenth-century immigrants, though *Wiener Schnitzel* uses a flour-egg-crumb sequence rather than the crumb-egg-crumb order given here. The Butterick Cook Book was issued by the pattern company as part of its household publishing, and this entry is written in a clipped, telegraphic style that assumes a reader who has fried meat before and needs only the order of operations. The insistence that "underdone veal is unwholesome" reflects a real period unease about undercooked veal, and cooking it thoroughly was the usual advice in American books of the era. Tomato sauce was a common partner to a breaded cutlet by about 1900, by which time canned tomatoes had made such a sauce available outside the summer months.