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Veal Chops, Finnoise
Neatly trim and lightly flatten six veal chops. Season evenly with a teaspoon salt and half a teaspoon white pepper. Heat two tablespoons melted lard in a frying pan, lay the chops in the pan, one beside another, and fry for five minutes on each side.
Then add one finely chopped green pepper; mix a little and cook for two minutes longer; with a spoon remove all the fat from the pan; pour over the chops half gill white wine and one gill tomato sauce; lightly mix. Cover the pan and set in the oven for ten minutes. Remove, arrange the chops on a large dish, pour the sauce over and serve.
A quick braise disguised as a fry: the chops are browned, deglazed, then finished covered in the oven. The original gives no oven temperature and no thickness for the chops, which are the two things worth pinning down.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. Half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup; one gill of tomato sauce is 1/2 cup. That is a modest amount of liquid, meant to glaze rather than submerge.
- Oven heatFilippini assumes you know; use a moderate oven, 350F. The pan is covered and the liquid shallow, so the point is gentle finishing, not further browning.
- Chop thickness and donenessFive minutes a side plus ten in the oven suits chops about 3/4 to 1 inch thick. Veal is lean and dries out fast, so go by an instant-read thermometer at 145F with a short rest rather than by the clock.
- LardTwo tablespoons of melted lard; lard was one of the common frying fats of the period. Clarified butter, a neutral oil, or lard all work; whichever you use, get the pan properly hot before the chops go in or they will steam.
- "Green pepper"In a 1900s American book this means a sweet bell pepper, not a chile. It goes in for only two minutes before the liquid, so chop it fine or it will stay raw and squeaky.
- Pouring off the fatThe recipe has you spoon out all the frying fat before the liquid goes in. If it stays, it will float over the wine and tomato and leave a greasy slick over the chops. Tip the pan and spoon it out before adding any liquid.
- Tomato sauceNot pasta sauce. Use a plain, unsweetened tomato sauce or passata, or thin canned crushed tomatoes; anything with garlic and herbs will bury the pepper and wine.
- YieldSix chops serves six as written, or four generously. The sauce is scant, so serve with something to catch it: rice, buttered noodles, or plain boiled potatoes.
"Finnoise" is one of the geographic garnish names that filled out late nineteenth-century French restaurant menus; here it appears to signal sweet peppers, though what the label had to do with Finland is unclear. Its appearance in Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book is characteristic: Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, gathered hundreds of these nationally labelled preparations into short, drilled paragraphs for cooks who needed a name for the menu card and a method that would hold up in service. The technique itself, brown then finish covered with wine and tomato, is standard hotel-kitchen procedure for a lean cut, and the pepper is doing nearly all the work of the label.