Home › Meats › Fried Veal Cutlets
Fried Veal Cutlets
Make a batter of half pint of milk, a well-beaten egg, and flour; fry the veal brown in sweet lard or beef-drippings, dip it in the batter and fry again till brown; drop some spoonfuls of batter in the hot lard after the veal is taken up, and serve them on top of the meat; put a little flour paste in the gravy with salt and pepper, let it come to a boil and pour it over the whole. The veal should be cut thin, pounded, and cooked nearly an hour. Cracker crumbs and egg may be used instead of batter, but the skillet should then be kept covered, and the veal cooked slowly for half an hour over a moderate fire. If a gravy is wanted sprinkle a little flour in the pan, add salt and pepper and a little water, let come to a boil, and pour over the cutlets; or, pound well, squeeze juice of lemon over the slices, let stand an hour or two, dip in beaten egg and then in fine bread-crumbs (if no stale bread is at hand dry slices in a cool oven), plunge at once into hot fat enough to cover. The slices will brown before they are thoroughly cooked, and the pan should be drawn aside to a cooler place to finish" more slowly. Fish may be fried in the same way; when done the meat will separate readily from the bone when a knife is inserted. They may be dipped in milk and then in flour, instead of in egg and breadcrumbs; sift salt evenly over the meat or fish just before serving. The bread-crumbs should be fine; if coarse, they crumble off with the egg in cooking.
A cluster of related methods rather than one recipe: batter-fried, cracker-crumbed, and lemon-marinated breaded cutlets, all in a single paragraph. Pick one route and ignore the others.
- The timing is the problemNearly an hour for a thin pounded cutlet belongs to an era of tough, older veal and uneven wood-fired heat. Modern veal cutlets pounded to about 1/4 inch are cooked through in two to three minutes a side; they will be dry and stringy long before thirty minutes, let alone sixty.
- Half pint of milkOne cup. With one egg and enough flour to bind, that makes a thin coating batter — add flour until it just coats the back of a spoon and clings to the meat.
- Sweet lard, beef-drippings"Sweet" means fresh and unsalted, not rancid. Lard or beef fat still work well here for their high smoke point; a neutral oil is the ordinary substitute.
- Flour pasteA slurry of flour whisked smooth into cold water before it goes into the pan, so it does not lump. Roughly a tablespoon of flour to a quarter cup of water thickens the pan juices from a single skillet.
- A moderate fireFor the covered cracker-crumb method, medium-low on a modern burner. The book gives no temperature, and "moderate" here means only a heat that will not scorch the crumbs. The lid steams as much as it fries, and thin cutlets need only a few minutes covered.
- Drawing the pan asideOn a range this is simply moving to a second burner on low, or off the heat entirely. It is the right instinct for a thick chop; unnecessary for a properly pounded cutlet.
- The batter frittersSpoonfuls of leftover batter dropped in the hot fat after the meat comes out. They cook in under a minute and should be lifted the moment they set and colour.
- Crumbs must be fineThe closing note is the practical one — coarse crumbs shed the egg wash and fall off in the fat. Grind dried bread properly, or use fine dry breadcrumbs.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of meat. The batter (one cup of milk and an egg) would coat roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of cutlets, enough for about four.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the late nineteenth-century family of compiled American household manuals, and this entry shows the style plainly: one heading, then every method the compilers had collected for the same cut, run together with semicolons and "or." Egging and crumbing cutlets before frying was long-established in English cookery, and the technique is of course shared with the Central European schnitzel tradition, though nothing in this entry shows which route it came by. The lemon-juice soak before breading is an old touch, and is usually explained as a tenderiser for meat from animals older than the milk-fed veal sold now. Note too the aside on drying bread slices in a cool oven when no stale loaf is at hand — evidence of a range holding residual heat, and a kitchen where nothing bread-shaped was thrown away.