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Veal Cutlets Sauted
Trim five or six veal cutlets, put them in a saucepan with a little stock, and boil them gently until they are done; then drain, place them on a plate, put another plate on top, with a weight on that, and leave them until cold. Boil some brown sauce with trimmings of truffles until well reduced, then dip in the cutlets and coat them thickly all over; sprinkle them with flour on both sides, brush over with beaten egg, cover thickly with finely grated breadcrumbs, and last of all brush over with clarified butter. Place the cutlets in a sautepan with a little butter, and saute them until lightly browned. Drain the cutlets, place them on a hot dish, garnish them with fried parsley, and serve with a sauceboatful of white sauce. Veal Cutlets, Spanish Style Place two or three thin slices of ham in the bottom of a saucepan, also a bunch of parsley, half a bay leaf and a little thyme. Trim some veal cutlets, season them with pepper and salt, lay them on top of the ham and butter and fry them over a moderate fire. Drain the fat off and pour on one-half teacupful of Spanish sauce and one tablespoonful of broth. Dish the cutlets, strain the sauce, pour it over them, and serve.
Veal Cutlets, St. Cloud Style.
Lard six veal cutlets with two small truffles, one ounce of cooked beef tongue, and one ounce of larding pork, all cut in the same fashion. Place them in a sautepan with a pinch of salt, one sliced onion and one sliced carrot, and allow them to brown for ten minutes, taking care to keep the lid on the pan. Moisten with one-half pint of broth, and place them in the oven to finish cooking for at least fifteen minutes. Serve with a hot salpicon sauce poured over the dish, and the chops placed on the top.
Calf's Ears, Financiere Style Cut off the ears, blanch and place in a saucepan with a little stock or water, and boil until quite tender. In the meantime cut a crouton of bread about two inches square at the base, and three inches high, fry in lard and put in the center of a dish. Take out the ears, dry them on a cloth, and stand them on the dish, leaning them against the bread; put a heap of financiere garnishing in the spaces between the ears, with a truffle and a cockscomb added. Put four cockscombs on the top of the bread, and a large truffle on top of them, and serve with some financiere sauce separate in a boat. Fried Calf's Ears with Tomato Sauce Boil eight ears, and let them cool in the liquor, drain, wipe dry, and cut up into quarters. Place them in a basin and dust over with chopped parsley, salt and pepper; flour them separately, dip into well-beaten egg, and then into sifted breadcrumbs. Put them into a fryingpan with plenty of boiling lard, putting in a few at a time, and fry them for about ten minutes. Then take them out, drain, pile on a dish, pour around tomato sauce, and serve. Calf's Feet as Mock Terrapin Boil eight feet till tender; remove the meat from the bone and put in a stewpan with one-half pint of the liquor in which they were boiled and three tablespoonfuls of butter. Mash the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs with one teaspoonful of dry mustard and a small pinch of cayenne, adding salt to the taste. Mix the egg in with the meat and stir over the fire for fifteen minutes and add two wineglassfuls of white wine. Dish, garnish with croutons of fried bread, and serve.
Five related veal and calf's-offal preparations from the Waldorf's French repertoire, written for a brigade that already knew the mother sauces and had a butcher on call. The variable that decides all of them is how gently the veal is cooked.
- The hinge: poach, don't boil"Boil them gently" in the first recipe means a bare shiver of the stock, not a rolling boil, and only until the cutlets are just firm — roughly 10 to 15 minutes for cutlets a half-inch thick. Veal at a true boil turns grey and stringy, and no amount of breadcrumb and butter will bring it back.
- Why the cutlets are pressedCooling the poached cutlets under a weighted plate compacts and flattens them so the brown-sauce coating clings and the crumb crust sets in an even sheet. Give them at least two hours in the refrigerator; a warm cutlet will shed its coating in the sautepan.
- The sauce names"Brown sauce" is espagnole; "Spanish sauce" in the second recipe is the same thing under its French name, sauce espagnole. The recipe does not say what its "white sauce" is: in a hotel kitchen of this date it would most likely be a velouté made with veal stock, though period American books also use the term for a milk-based sauce. A salpicon is a garnish of small even dice — truffle, tongue, mushroom — bound in a little sauce.
- Teacupful and wineglassfulPeriod cup measures are inexact: a teacupful is usually reckoned at somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz, a wineglassful at about 2 fl oz. So the Spanish-style cutlets take roughly 2 to 3 fl oz of sauce, and the mock terrapin about 4 fl oz of white wine.
- Oven heatThe St. Cloud cutlets go into the oven to finish, but no heat is given; a moderate oven — call it 350F — suits the braise. Fifteen minutes is a minimum — check that the braise is tender rather than trusting the clock.
- LardingLarding means threading strips of pork fat, tongue and truffle through the lean meat with a larding needle. Modern veal is sold too thin to lard easily; the usual substitute is to lay the strips over the cutlets and tie or bard them.
- Cockscombs and financièreFinancière garnish is cockscombs, cock's kidneys, quenelles, mushrooms and truffle in a Madeira-spiked sauce. Cockscombs are effectively unobtainable outside specialist butchers now, and the garnish is generally rebuilt with quenelles, mushrooms and truffle alone.
- Calf's ears and feetBoth need ordering from a butcher and both need long cooking — feet want three to four hours to come away from the bone, ears one and a half to two. Blanch them first in fresh water and discard it; that step is what keeps the finished dish from tasting of the barnyard.
- Frying the boiled earsTen minutes in the fat is a great deal for already-cooked, crumbed pieces. Two to three minutes at 350–365F browns the crust; longer only dries the meat and darkens the crumbs.
- YieldThe first recipe specifies five or six cutlets and the St. Cloud six, so each will serve five or six; the Spanish-style recipe leaves the number open. The eight ears of the fried recipe will serve four to six as a course; the mock terrapin from eight feet will fill about six small plates as a starter.
Oscar Tschirky was never a cook — he was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel — but the 1896 Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf collected the hotel kitchen's working repertoire, which was Franco-American haute cuisine of the Escoffier generation: espagnole and velouté, truffle trimmings used up in coating sauces, garnishes named for places and financiers. Financière garnish is traditionally explained by the extravagance of its components, though that is the customary account rather than a documented one; St. Cloud, like most such labels, marks a house treatment rather than any origin we can trace. The most telling entry is the last. Diamondback terrapin was a Gilded Age luxury, stewed with butter, egg yolk, mustard and sherry and served in the same clubs and hotels that employed Oscar; overharvesting made it scarce and expensive, and cooks answered with mock terrapin built from cheap gelatinous cuts — calf's feet, calf's head, sometimes chicken — dressed with the same egg-yolk-and-wine liaison that gave the original its character. Nothing about the dish tastes of turtle; the imitation lies entirely in the texture and the sauce.