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Veal Chops, Deleier
Neatly trim and flatten six tender veal chops. Season all around with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Heat a tablespoon butter in a sautoire, add the chops one beside another and cook for six minutes on each side on a brisk fire, then add one finely minced red carrot, one minced onion and a good-sized red tomato cut into small pieces. Moisten with two gills white broth, cover the pan and slowly cook for ten minutes. Finely hash a branch white celery, the rind of a quarter of an orange and one blade foelie of nutmeg. Reduce this in a small frying pan with a tablespoon butter for five minutes on the fire; add one tablespoon flour, mix lightly, add half gill sherry, thoroughly mix and add to the chops; mix a little. Cook the whole for ten minutes longer. Dress the chops on a hot dish, pour the garnishing over and serve.
A brisk sear followed by a short braise, with an aromatic paste of celery, orange rind and mace stirred in at the end. The unfamiliar words are mostly Dutch and French, and the timings assume chops thinner than most butchers cut today.
- The hinge: the flour goes in rawThe celery, orange and mace mixture is a rough roux made in a second pan; it needs the full five minutes of buttery cooking and then a real minute after the flour goes in, or the finished sauce tastes pasty. Add the sherry off the heat, stir smooth, then scrape the whole thing into the chop pan.
- GillsA gill is a quarter-pint, so two gills of broth is one cup and half a gill of sherry is a scant quarter cup. That is a shallow braising liquid by design, not a stew.
- FoelieDutch for mace, the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed. "One blade foelie of nutmeg" means a single blade of mace, not nutmeg itself; a scant quarter teaspoon of ground mace stands in, added with the flour rather than hashed with the celery.
- Sautoire and white brothA sautoire is a straight-sided sauté pan wide enough to hold six chops in one layer without crowding, with a lid. White broth is unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made without roasting the bones; light chicken stock is the practical substitute.
- Brisk fireRead this as high heat for the sear and low for both ten-minute stages, barely bubbling under the lid. Once the vegetables and stock go in, hard boiling squeezes the chops dry.
- Total cooking timeTwelve minutes of searing plus twenty of braising suits a thin chop, on the order of half an inch. A modern inch-thick loin or rib chop wants about three minutes a side to colour and then the covered time; pull them at 145F internal and let the sauce finish alone if it needs reducing.
- Orange rindTake the zest only with a peeler or rasp and leave the white pith, which turns the sauce bitter over the fifteen minutes of cooking it gets here. A quarter of an orange is roughly a teaspoon of zest.
- ServingSix chops, so six servings. The garnish is loose and brothy rather than thickened to a gravy; boiled or steamed potatoes catch it, and warm the platter properly since the sauce is thin enough to chill fast.
Filippini's International Cook Book collects thousands of short recipes, many of them tagged with a place name or a surname — and "Deleier" is one of those tags that has left no trace beyond the page. The Dutch word foelie for mace is the strongest clue to its origins; it is the ordinary Netherlands grocery term, and mace with veal is a long-standing northern European pairing, as is the flourish of orange rind, a habit inherited from the medieval and early modern taste for citrus peel as a spice rather than a fruit. Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and the method here is squarely that of a professional restaurant kitchen around 1900: sear in one pan, build an aromatic thickening in a second, marry them for the last ten minutes and send the dish out on a hot platter.