Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Beef Cutlets
Beef Cutlets
Trim all fat and skin from some slices of beef and shape them like cutlets, then salt and pepper them. Place a small lump of butter in a sautepan, and when melted fry the cutlets on both sides till done. Sprinkle over them a little chopped parsley, place on a dish, and pour over them a thick brown gravy.
A plain sauté with no quantities, no cut named and no timings — typical of Oscar's shorthand for a working kitchen. The decisions the recipe leaves out are the ones worth making deliberately.
- What "cutlet" means hereNot a breaded veal-style cutlet but simply a slice of beef trimmed into the flat, tapered, cutlet shape; the recipe says only "shape them like cutlets" and names no cut. Sirloin, top round or tenderloin tips all work; cut about 3/4 inch thick and pound lightly to even thickness.
- SautepanA straight-sided pan with a lid in period usage, but any heavy skillet serves. Use one wide enough that the cutlets sit apart; crowded meat steams and will not brown, which is the whole point of the dish.
- "Till done"For a 3/4-inch cutlet over medium-high heat that is roughly 2 to 3 minutes a side for medium-rare, longer if you want it grey through. The recipe leaves the degree of doneness entirely to the cook.
- Butter alone will burnA small lump of butter in a hot pan browns past the point of usefulness before the meat colours. Clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, gives the same flavour without the black specks.
- Season and drySalt and pepper as directed, but blot the slices dry first. Surface moisture is the difference between a browned crust and a grey one.
- The brown gravyOscar assumes a kitchen with espagnole or a reduced brown stock standing by. Deglaze the pan with stock or red wine and reduce until it coats a spoon; a thin gravy on a plain cutlet leaves the dish with nothing to say.
- Resting and yieldLet the cutlets sit two or three minutes before saucing so the juices settle. The recipe gives no quantities; reckon on about one 6-ounce cutlet per person. The parsley goes on at the last moment, off the heat, or it dulls.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria from the 1890s, and his 1896 Cook Book is less a book of set pieces than a working index of what a large hotel kitchen turned out daily nentries like this one. "Cutlet" in that kitchen described a shape rather than a cut: any trimmed slice of meat formed into the flat oval of a chop, which is why the book has beef, veal and chicken cutlets side by side. The brevity may well be deliberate. A recipe like this was written for cooks who already had a stockpot of brown sauce on the range and needed only to be told the trim, the pan and the garnish; it is tempting to conclude that the sauce, not the beef, was where a hotel kitchen of the period showed its hand.