No. 2273

Veal Cutlets, Pogarski

Cotelettes de Veau Pogarski

Chop up one pound of fillet of veal free of all sinews, mix it in with ten ounces of butter, two ounces of bread-crumbs, half an ounce of salt, and nutmeg; roll about three ounces of this on a table, besprinkle with rice flour and shape them into the form of cutlets; dip in beaten eggs, roll in bread-crumbs and fry in clarified butter; glaze each cutlet over with a brush and dress them in a circle with paper favor frills (No. 10) on the ends. Garnish with fried potatoes cut in five-eighths inch balls and serve separately a tomato sauce (No. 549) mixed with half-glaze sauce (No. 413).

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For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's version of the Russian pozharsky cutlet: chopped veal bound with an enormous quantity of butter, breaded, and fried. The butter is the point, and it is also the difficulty.

Keep everything coldTen ounces of butter to one pound of veal means butter is about a third of the mixture by weight. It must be worked cold and chilled hard before shaping, or the cutlets slump in the pan and leak butter into the fat. Chill the shaped cutlets again after breading.
Chop, do not purée"Chop up" means hand-chopped or coarsely ground, not a smooth paste. A food processor will emulsify the butter into the meat and give a dense, sausage-like texture rather than the loose, juicy crumb the dish is known for.
The salt is highHalf an ounce is about 14 g, roughly 2 percent of the total mixture by weight, which is on the high side for modern taste; fry off a small test patty first and adjust downward if wanted.
Rice flourStill sold in Asian groceries and baking aisles. It is used here because it stays dry and does not develop gluten, so the cutlets shape without sticking. Cornstarch behaves similarly if rice flour is not at hand.
Clarified butterOrdinary butter will burn before the cutlets are through. Clarify it, or use ghee. Fry over moderate heat: these are thick and heavily fatted, and a hot pan colours the crumbs long before the centre is done.
Ground veal needs a temperatureChopped meat cannot be judged by colour the way a whole cutlet can. Take it to 160F / 71C in the centre, which for a three-ounce cutlet is roughly four to five minutes a side at moderate heat.
"Glaze each cutlet over with a brush"This means meat glaze — stock reduced to a syrup — painted on for shine, not sugar. A tablespoon of reduced veal or chicken stock does the job. Skip it and the cutlets look dull but taste the same.
Frills and garnishThe paper frills are pure dining-room theatre and can be left off. The potato garnish is balls scooped with a parisienne cutter and fried; the sauce is simply tomato sauce let down with half-glaze (demi-glace), in whatever proportion suits, as the recipe gives none.
YieldThe mixture comes to about 28.5 ounces, which at roughly three ounces a cutlet gives about nine, enough for four as a main course.

A Little History

Pozharsky cutlets are traced to the town of Torzhok on the Moscow–St Petersburg post road, and by tradition to the innkeeper Darya Pozharskaya, whose tavern Pushkin recommended in a verse letter of the 1820s — the line about dining on fried cutlets at Pozharsky's is one of the most quoted advertisements in Russian food writing. The classic version is minced chicken enriched with butter, breaded and fried, and the butter is what distinguishes it from any other croquette: it melts in the pan and keeps the lean chopped meat succulent. By the time Charles Ranhofer set the dish down in The Epicurean (1894), the record of Delmonico's kitchen in New York, it had passed through French professional cookery and come out as côtelettes de veau Pogarski — veal rather than chicken, dressed in a circle with frilled paper cuffs and a sauceboat alongside. The spelling drift from Pozharsky to Pogarski is itself a small map of how the dish travelled.