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Curried Veal Cutlets
The veal cutlets should be prepared as for collops by cutting them into shape, dipping them into the yolks of eggs and covering with grated breadcrumbs mixed with two tablespoonfuls of curry powder and one tablespoonful of salt. Fry them in butter and serve with a curry sauce made as follows: Take three equal parts of curry powder, butter and flour, work them into a paste, turn it into the pan from which the cutlets have been removed, moisten with one breakfast cupful of water, add a seasoning of cayenne and salt and allow it to thicken before using.
Veal Cutlets, Dauphin Trim half a dozen cutlets of veal on one side only, lard them with veal and bacon chopped fine and braise them. Reduce the liquor in which they were stewed, then glaze the cutlets with it, and serve either with stewed endives or sorrel.
Veal Cutlets, Financiere Cut a few cutlets from a neck of veal, shorten the rib bones and cut off the chine bones. Beat the cutlets lightly with a cutlet bat, stud them all over the same side in a fancy pattern with square fillets of truffles and sprinkle some salt and pepper over. Put some finely-chopped carrots and onions in a stewpan, then the cutlets, placing them side by side, and cover them with a clear broth. Boil the liquor until it is reduced to one-third of its original quantity, then move the stewpan to the side of the fire and braise the cutlets slowly for about forty-five minutes, basting them frequently. When cooked remove the meat from the fire and leave them in their cooking stock until nearly cold. Trim the cutlets neatly, place them in another stewpan with the cooking stock and heat them slowly in the oven. Cover the bottom of a hot dish with financiere sauce, place some ruffles around the bones of the cutlets, lay them on the dish, and serve.
Three recipes run together here under one heading, all built on the same cut: a thin veal cutlet, breaded and fried or braised and glazed. The seasoning in the curried version is aggressive by modern standards and worth adjusting before you start.
- The salt in the breadingA tablespoon of salt worked into the crumbs for a few cutlets is far more than a modern palate wants, and the curry sauce is salted again on top. Use about a teaspoon in the crumb mixture and correct the sauce at the end.
- Curry powder, then and nowCommercial curry powders of this period were blended to no fixed formula and were often milder than many jars sold today. Two tablespoons in the crumbs plus equal parts in the roux will read as very strong; start with half and build.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces — treat it as one standard cup. The sauce is a straight roux thinned with water, so use stock instead if you want it to taste of anything beyond curry.
- CollopsAn old term for meat cut into thin slices or small pieces for quick frying. Here it means the cutlets are simply cut and trimmed to an even shape so they cook through in a few minutes.
- Larding, DauphinLarding normally means threading strips of fat through lean meat with a larding needle, though the recipe's 'chopped fine' points to a fine veal-and-bacon mixture worked onto the trimmed side instead. Modern veal cutlets are usually too thin to lard; barding -- laying bacon over the top during braising -- gives a similar result.
- Chine bones and the cutlet batThe chine is the spine section left attached when a rack is cut; ask a butcher to remove it. A cutlet bat is a flat meat mallet, and "lightly" is the operative word — veal cutlets tear if pounded hard.
- Braising temperature"Move the stewpan to the side of the fire" means a bare simmer, not a boil. In a modern oven a low setting, somewhere around 300F, should hold it there, and the reheat before serving can be lower still.
- Financière sauce and trufflesFinancière is a madeira-enriched brown sauce classically garnished with quenelles, cockscombs, mushrooms and truffle. A good demi-glace with madeira and sliced mushrooms is the practical substitute; a small amount of preserved truffle stands in for the studded fillets.
- "Ruffles"Almost certainly paper frills for the rib bones — a standard finish for cutlets and chops in this period, purely decorative.
- YieldThe Dauphin and Financière versions specify half a dozen and "a few" cutlets respectively; count two per person for a main course, one if the cutlets are large.
Oscar Tschirky's book collects the working repertoire of a great American hotel kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century, which is to say a French repertoire with a few Anglo-Indian guests admitted. Curried veal belongs to the latter group: ready-blended curry powder is attested in British commercial grocery from the 1780s, with American availability following in the nineteenth century, sold so that a hotel cook could produce "curry" without any knowledge of the spices in it, and by the 1890s a curried cutlet was a standard item on club and hotel menus. The other two preparations are pure Escoffier-era classicism. Financière takes its name from the richness of its garnish — the sauce of the financier, generally traced to the extravagant garnishes of early nineteenth-century Paris restaurant cooking — and its cockscombs, kidneys and truffles were an index of how much a kitchen was willing to spend. That all three sit side by side under one heading tells you what the Waldorf line cook was expected to hold in his head at once.