Home › Meats › Veal Cutlets with Cream Gravy
Veal Cutlets with Cream Gravy
Wipe the cutlets, sprinkle them with salt and pepper, dip them first in beaten egg and 25 then in fine bread or cracker crumbs, and fry in drippings until brown. The cutlets should be thoroughly browned on both sides. Place them on a platter, add cream to the gravy in the pan, and thicken slightly with one tablespoon of flour wet in a little water.
A plain breaded cutlet with a pan gravy; the recipe assumes you know what a veal cutlet is and how hot your skillet ought to be. A few points fill in what Butterick left unsaid.
- The stray "25"The numeral in the first sentence is a printing or digitisation artifact (most likely a line or page number), not a quantity. Read it as "dip them first in beaten egg and then in fine crumbs."
- What a cutlet meantIn cookbooks of this period a veal cutlet was generally a slice from the leg or loin, often around half an inch thick, rather than the paper-thin scaloppine sold today. If your cutlets are pounded thin, they will cook in a couple of minutes a side rather than the longer browning the recipe implies.
- DrippingsBeef or pork drippings were a common household frying fat. Clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, gives similar browning with less risk of smoking; plain butter alone can burn before the crumbs colour if the pan is hot.
- Breading that stays onWipe the cutlets genuinely dry, then season, then egg, then crumbs, and let them sit five to ten minutes before frying so the coating sets. Cracker crumbs brown faster and darker than bread crumbs, so watch the heat if you use them.
- Doneness"Thoroughly browned on both sides" was the only gauge available. Veal is cooked through at 145F internal with a short rest; half-inch cutlets reach that at about four minutes a side over medium-high heat, and further frying only dries them.
- The gravyPour off all but a tablespoon or two of fat and scrape up the browned crumbs stuck to the pan, since they are most of the flavour. The recipe adds the cream first and then the flour-and-water slurry; if you prefer, cook the slurry in the hot pan a moment before the cream goes in to take off any raw-flour taste. Add cream to taste -- roughly half a cup suits the single tablespoon of flour called for.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. One cutlet per person is a fair guide, and the single tablespoon of flour called for will thicken enough gravy for about four.
Breaded veal cutlets fried in dripping and finished with a cream pan sauce belong to the German and Austrian cooking that is often said to have reached American tables through immigrant households in the nineteenth century, and the dish is generally regarded as the same family as Wiener Schnitzel and the cream-gravy schnitzel still eaten in central Europe. American cookbooks of the period, Butterick's among them, gave veal a great deal of room, and it is commonly suggested that dairy farming's surplus bull calves made veal cheaper and more widely available than it is now. The Butterick Publishing Company came to cookery from dress patterns, and the terseness here seems to assume a reader who already knew how to fry and needed only the proportions and the order of operations.