No. 1495

Veal Cutlets a la Chipolata

Cotelettes de Veau a la Chipolata

Pare some veal cutlets and lard them with cooked unsmoked red beef tongue. Cover the bottom of a buttered sautoir with round slices of onions, carrots, thyme, bay leaf, and branches of parsley; lay the cutlets on top and moisten to the heighth of the vegetables with stock; cover with a buttered paper, let boil and cook on a moderate fire basting them frequently. Dress the cutlets when done, strain the stock, skim off the fat and reduce it to a half-glaze, add as much brown sauce and garnish with braised chestnuts, braised carrots and turnips, also some mushrooms and small boiled chipolata sausages.

← No. 1494 Calf's Crow a la Normande Veal No. 1496 Veal Cutlets Plain and a la Georgina →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a cook who already knows how to braise and lard, so the instructions are compressed. The points below fill in the numbers and the vessels.

SautoirA straight-sided shallow pan; a 12-inch skillet or a wide braiser with a lid stands in. The bed of sliced vegetables and herbs underneath keeps the meat off direct heat and flavours the liquid.
Larding with tongueThe cutlets are threaded with strips of cooked, unsmoked (pickled or brine-cured red) beef tongue using a larding needle. Cured tongue is now hard to source unsmoked; ordinary cooked tongue works, and the dish survives without the larding if you skip it.
CutletsNot the thin scallops sold as veal cutlets today; Ranhofer's cotelettes are bone-in rib or loin chops, trimmed and the bone scraped clean. He gives no thickness.
"Moderate fire"A bare simmer rather than a rolling boil once it has come up. The recipe keeps the pan on the stove, so any oven equivalent is a modern substitution; allow roughly 35-45 minutes for thick chops. The paper lid (cartouche) and frequent basting keep the exposed tops from drying.
Half-glazeReduce the strained, defatted braising liquid until it coats a spoon and is just short of syrupy, then add an equal volume of brown sauce (the book's own brown sauce/Espagnole; a good reduced veal stock thickened lightly is the modern equivalent).
ChipolataHere the word names the whole garnish, not just the sausage: chestnuts, glazed carrots and turnips, mushrooms and small sausages. Chipolata sausages themselves are slim fresh pork links, and Ranhofer has them boiled rather than fried.
ChestnutsPeeled vacuum-packed chestnuts braise in stock and butter in about 15 minutes and save an hour of work. They break easily, so add them to the plate last.
YieldRanhofer only says "some" cutlets; figure one chop per person, with the garnish making up the rest of the plate.

A Little History

Chipolata came into French kitchen French from the Italian cipollata, something made with onions, and by the nineteenth century it had settled into the name of a fixed garnish: chestnuts, glazed root vegetables, mushrooms, sometimes salt pork or bacon, and the small sausages that still carry the name in Britain and France. Ranhofer, cooking at Delmonico's in New York in the 1890s, reproduces it as a matter of course, exactly as he does dozens of other named garnitures scattered through The Epicurean. That is the useful thing about the book: it is written for professionals who needed the shorthand, so a line like "garnish a la chipolata" carried a complete, agreed set of components. The braise itself, meat set on a bed of aromatic vegetables under buttered paper, is the standard nineteenth-century method for pale meats, designed to cook them through without browning and to leave behind a liquid worth reducing.