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Veal Collops
Pare and cut two pounds of veal (taken, if possible, from the hip), into half a dozen thick slices, season them with one pinch of salt and one-half pinch of pepper, place them in a sautepan on a very hot fire with one ounce of butter and brown them for five minutes on each side. Place them on a hot dish, and serve with any desired sauce or garnish.
Veal Collops, Provincial These are prepared as for veal collops, replacing the butter with the same quantity of oil. Season well and when browned on both sides add a finely-chopped onion or a shallot. Let color lightly and moisten with one gill of broth. Add two tablespoonfuls of Spanish sauce, three chopped cepes or mushrooms, two crushed cloves of garlic and one teaspoonful of parsley. Boil once, and serve with six croutons of fried bread for a garnish.
Two versions of the same plain dish: veal slices browned hard in fat, then either sauced to taste or finished in the Provençal manner with garlic, mushrooms and a brown sauce. The whole thing hangs on the browning, and on not overcooking lean leg meat.
- What a collop isA collop is simply a slice cut from a larger piece of meat, here about a third of a pound each. Ask for veal top round or leg, cut roughly 3/4 inch thick, and pound lightly so they cook evenly.
- Very hot fire, and butter"A very hot fire" means a heavy pan over high heat until the butter foams and the foam subsides. One ounce (2 tablespoons) of whole butter will scorch at that heat in a thin pan; clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of oil, holds up better. Five minutes a side is aggressive for veal this thick, and lean leg meat dries fast: brown 3 to 4 minutes a side and pull it while the center is still faintly pink.
- GillOne gill is half a cup, so 4 fluid ounces of broth for the Provincial version.
- Spanish sauceSauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce of the period, built from brown roux, brown stock and tomato. Two tablespoons of good demi-glace, or reduced brown stock thickened lightly, gives the same effect without making a quart of sauce for a spoonful of use.
- CepesCèpes are porcini. Fresh are seasonal and costly; a small handful of dried porcini soaked in hot water works well, and the strained soaking liquid can replace part of the broth. Cremini are the practical stand-in.
- Garlic and "boil once"Two crushed cloves in a half cup of liquid is assertive but correct for the Provençal style. "Boil once" means bring the sauce to a single boil and take it off; the meat is already cooked and further simmering toughens it.
- CroutonsCroutons here are not cubes but slices or triangles of bread fried in oil or butter, one under or beside each collop. Fry them before the meat and keep them warm.
- YieldTwo pounds in six slices serves six as a small course, or three to four as a main plate. The plain version is written to be finished with whatever sauce the kitchen had going, so treat it as a base rather than a finished dish.
"Collop" is an old English kitchen word for a slice of meat cut for quick frying, recorded from at least the fourteenth century and associated with Collop Monday, the day before Shrove Tuesday, when households ate up their meat before Lent. In American hotel cookery of Oscar Tschirky's day the word appears mainly as a menu term for small sauteed cuts, often veal. The second version, labeled "Provincial," reads as a rendering of a la provencale: oil instead of butter, garlic, tomato-tinged brown sauce, mushrooms, fried bread. The book often gives a bare method first and then a variation, a pattern that suits a kitchen working from a standing stock of mother sauces.