No. 1504

Veal Cutlets with Fine Herbs

Cotelettes de Veau aux Fines Herbes

Cut, pare, beat, and season six or eight veal cutlets; put them into a sautoir containing butter, fry them on both sides over a brisk fire, and when well browned, drain off the fat into another small saucepan, and lay it on one side. Moisten the meat with a little stock (No. 194a), let the liquid fall slowly to a glaze in such a way as to finish the cooking, and lastly add a few spoonfuls of white wine. In the fat put aside, fry colorless two or three spoonfuls of chopped shallots and onions, with five or six spoonfuls of chopped up raw mushrooms, and continue frying until these have lost all their humidity, then thicken with a half-glaze sauce (No. 413). Let this cook for a few minutes, and pour it over the cutlets in the sautoir; besprinkle with a few spoonfuls of chopped truffles and cooked ham, and let simmer together for seven or eight minutes. Dress the cutlets garnished with frills (No. 10) on a long dish; add to the sauce a pinch of chopped and blanched parsley leaves, pour it over the meat.

← No. 1503 Veal Cutlets Studded with Truffles Veal No. 1505 Stuffed Ears, Tomato Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade that already has stock and sauce on the stove, so most of the work here is assembling the two cross-references before you start. The dish is a duxelles-and-demi-glace sauce built in two pans.

The hinge: dry the mushrooms"Continue frying until these have lost all their humidity" is the instruction that decides the sauce. Chopped raw mushrooms release a great deal of water; keep them over the heat, stirring, until the pan is dry and the mixture begins to catch, or the finished sauce will be thin and gray rather than glossy.
SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, not a covered casserole in the modern sense. A heavy 12-inch skillet works, provided everything sits in one layer.
The cross-referencesNo. 194a is Ranhofer's stock and No. 413 is his half-glaze, which is demi-glace: brown sauce reduced with stock until it coats a spoon. A good reduced veal stock, lightly thickened, stands in for both.
Veal cutletsThe frills for the bone point to rib or loin chops rather than boneless slices. Cut about three-quarters of an inch thick, trimmed and lightly flattened, works well; boneless scaloppine are too thin for this treatment and will be dry before the sauce is finished.
Brisk fireHigh heat for the initial browning only. Once the stock goes in the pan should be at a bare simmer so the liquid reduces to a glaze rather than boiling the meat.
Total cooking timeBrowning, the reduction, and the final seven or eight minutes together come to roughly 20 minutes. Veal chops are best pulled at about 145F taken in the thickest part, clear of the bone; longer simmering in the sauce toughens them.
Truffles and frillsThe chopped truffle is a seasoning here rather than a centerpiece; a small amount of good preserved truffle, or none at all with the ham and mushrooms carrying the dish, is reasonable. The frills of No. 10 are paper cuffs for the exposed rib bones, purely for the platter.
SpoonfulsRanhofer's unqualified "spoonful" is usually read as a tablespoon. Two or three of shallot and onion and five or six of mushroom means something like two to three tablespoons of alliums to about a third of a cup of mushrooms.
YieldSix to eight cutlets serve six to eight as a main course.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer put The Epicurean together in 1894, after a tenure as chef of Delmonico's in New York that ran in two stints from 1862 and continued past publication, and its numbered cross-references are the reason the book reads like a factory manual: each recipe assumes the stockpot, the brown sauce and the garnishes already exist elsewhere in the kitchen. "Aux fines herbes" in nineteenth-century French cooking did not always mean the modern quartet of chervil, chives, tarragon and parsley; as here, it frequently signaled a sauce built on finely chopped shallot, onion and mushroom — essentially a duxelles — with parsley added at the end for color. The technique of browning meat, pouring off the fat to build a separate garnish in it, then reuniting the two is used here, and the truffle and cooked ham scattered over the top mark this as a restaurant dish rather than a household one.