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Brisotin of Veal
Cut up six pieces of lean veal about one-fourth of an inch in thickness and six inches in length. Flatten them with a cutlet bat and season with a small quantity each of salt and pepper. Lard the centers, using a small larding-needle, with strips of fat pork or bacon. Cover with any kind of forcemeat, roll them up and tie with a string. Put them into a deep sautepan with a small quantity of fat, one sliced carrot and one medium-sized onion. Cover the whole with a piece of buttered paper, set it on fire, allow it to take on a good golden color for about five minutes. Moisten with one-half pint of white broth, remove the sautepan to the oven and cook slowly for twenty minutes, basting occasionally. Turn the whole carefully out onto a dish, and serve it at once.
Brisotin of Veal, Nantaise The same as for Brisotin of Veal, placing half a dozen stuffed lettuce heads around the dish for a garnish and pouring over one gill of hot Madeira sauce. Broiled Veal, Venetian Procure some rather thick and large slices of veal and lay them on a dish with some chopped mushrooms and shallots, some thyme, bayleaf and chopped parsley. Dredge them over with salt and pepper and baste them with a few tablespoonfuls of olive oil. Allow the slices to steep in this marinade for an hour or so, turning them now and then so that they will be equally flavored. Strew them over with finely grated breadcrumbs, place them side by side on a gridiron and broil over a clear fire. When done on one side, turn and baste them with the remainder of the marinade. When cooked, arrange the slices of veal on a hot dish, squeeze the juice of an orange over, and serve.
Three related preparations run together in one entry: veal roulades braised in a covered pan, the same dish dressed with stuffed lettuce and Madeira, and a marinated broiled cutlet. The first is where the difficulties are.
- "Set it on fire" means the stoveThis is not a flambé. Nineteenth-century kitchen English used "set on the fire" for putting a pan over direct heat, and the buttered paper on top would make ignition impossible anyway. Colour the rolls on the range for five minutes, then move the pan to the oven.
- Buttered paperA cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the diameter of the pan, buttered on one side and laid directly on the meat. It holds in moisture without sealing the pan, so the braising liquid still reduces. Foil is not the same thing and will steam the exterior colour away.
- Cut and thicknessQuarter-inch slices six inches long, from the leg or loin, pounded thinner still. Veal scallopini or cutlets sold for schnitzel are the right thing; ask the butcher to cut across the grain from a single muscle so the slices hold together under the bat.
- LardingThreading strips of fatback or bacon through lean veal with a larding needle is largely a lost technique and not strictly necessary here, since the forcemeat and the fat in the pan do similar work. If you skip it, lay a thin sheet of bacon or caul fat inside the roll before the forcemeat.
- Forcemeat"Any kind" presumably points to whatever standing preparation the kitchen had on hand: pounded veal or pork bound with egg and cream, or a panada-based chicken quenelle mixture. A modern equivalent is a simple sausage or ground-veal stuffing with breadcrumb, egg, shallot and herbs. Keep it thin, roughly a quarter inch, or the rolls may not cook through in twenty minutes.
- White broth and the gillWhite broth is unbrowned veal or chicken stock. Half a pint is one cup by US measure. The gill of Madeira sauce in the Nantaise variation is half a cup.
- Oven and donenessThe book gives no temperatures; "cook slowly" would correspond to a moderate oven, roughly 325-350F on a modern range. Twenty minutes is plausible for thin rolls about an inch and a half in diameter; go by an internal temperature of 160F in the stuffing, since ground meat filling sets the standard, not the veal.
- Serving and yieldSix rolls, so six servings as a course or three as a main. Cut the strings before plating, which the original assumes but does not say, and spoon the reduced pan liquid with its carrot and onion over the top.
- The broiled Venetian variantAn hour in oil with mushrooms, shallots and herbs is a marinade, not a cure; keep it refrigerated. "A clear fire" means coals burnt down past the flame stage, or a broiler fully preheated. Breadcrumbs over oiled meat catch quickly, so watch it rather than timing it.
Oscar Tschirky was not a chef but the maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, and his 1896 Cook Book reads like an inventory of what a large New York French kitchen could turn out on demand: veal preparation after veal preparation, each a small permutation of the last. Brisotin belongs to the family of stuffed, rolled and braised meat slices that French cookery calls paupiettes and English cookery once called "veal birds"; the term itself is uncommon and seems to have belonged more to the hotel and restaurant French of the period than to the classic canonical lists, though the evidence for so obscure a word is thin. The "Nantaise" tag follows the standard practice of naming a dish for its garnish rather than its method, and the stuffed lettuce heads that define it here are a reminder of how much braised vegetable work a brigade kitchen kept going alongside the meat. The three recipes printed in sequence also show the book's real purpose: it was a reference for cooks who already knew how to make forcemeat and Madeira sauce, and needed only to be told which combination went out under which name.