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Veal Chops, Piedmontaise
Heat a tablespoon butter in a small saucepan, add one finely chopped onion, one ounce finely chopped lean raw ham and half a finely chopped green pepper; slowly cook for five minutes or until a light brown, frequently stirring meanwhile. Add four ounces Italian rice, gently stir and cook for five minutes, lightly mixing at the bottom meanwhile; moisten with a pint of broth and one gill tomato sauce. Season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper and half saltspoon Spanish saffron. Mix again, cover the pan, boil for five minutes, then set in the oven for twenty-five minutes. Remove and keep warm.
Neatly trim and flatten six veal chops. Season them all around with a teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon pepper; lightly roll them in flour, then in beaten egg and in bread crumbs. Heat two tablespoons lard in a frying pan, add the chops, one beside another, and fry for eight minutes on each side. Dress the rice in the centre of a dish, dome shape, arrange the veal chops around the dish and serve.
A rice pilaf finished in the oven, ringed with breaded veal chops. Two things need attention: the frying time, which is far too long for flattened chops, and the rice quantity, which is slight for six people.
- Frying timeEight minutes a side on a flattened, crumbed veal chop will give you dry meat and scorched breadcrumbs. Pounded chops of ordinary thickness need roughly 3 to 4 minutes per side over medium heat, to an internal temperature of 145F with a short rest.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "two saltspoons white pepper" is half a teaspoon and the saffron is about an eighth of a teaspoon.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Use 350F, covered, and check at 20 minutes; the rice should have absorbed the liquid and be just tender.
- Liquid ratioFour ounces of rice to a pint of broth plus half a cup of tomato sauce is a high ratio, close to 5:1, and yields a soft, moist rice rather than distinct grains. If you want it firmer, hold back a third of the broth and add it only if the pan goes dry.
- Italian riceA short-grain rice of the Po valley type; a modern risotto rice such as Arborio or Carnaroli stands in. Four ounces is roughly half to two-thirds of a cup dry, a modest bed for six chops. Doubling the rice and its aromatics, with liquid scaled to match, suits modern serving.
- Lean raw hamRaw here means uncooked-cured, not fresh pork. Prosciutto crudo or pancetta, an ounce finely chopped, does exactly what is intended. It is cooked through in the pan with the onion.
- LardTwo tablespoons of lard fries the crumb coating well and can be used as written. Clarified butter or a neutral oil with a knob of butter works the same way; whole butter alone will brown too fast over the heat these chops need.
- ServingSix chops, so six servings. The rice is shaped into a dome in the centre of a warmed dish, with the chops arranged around it.
Piedmontaise, in the French kitchen vocabulary that governed hotel cookery when this book was compiled, signals Piedmont in northwest Italy and in practice means rice, often a dome-shaped mould of it beside the meat. Piedmont is the heart of Italian rice growing, the Vercelli and Novara paddies supplying the short-grain varieties that make risotto possible, so the garnish name is a reasonable piece of geography rather than a flourish. What this version shows is how thoroughly Italian dishes reached American readers through French professional practice: the rice is sweated with onion and cured ham and moistened with broth in the risotto manner, then abandoned to the oven in the way a French chef would treat a pilaf, and the veal is a straightforward breaded cutlet. It is the hotel dining room's international repertoire, offered to households that had never seen it.