Home › The World's Kitchen › Veal Chops, San Francisco
Veal Chops, San Francisco
Have eighteen dried California prunes soaked in fresh water over night. Neatly trim and flatten six fresh, white veal chops. Place on a plate and season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Heat one and a half tablespoons butter in an earthen cocotte dish. Place the chops in the cocotte, one beside another, with a sound bean garlic and two whole, peeled shallots and briskly fry them for five minutes on each side; take up the chops and keep on a plate. Remove the garlic and shallots from the pan, then mix in one and a half tablespoons flour; add a gill Zinfandel wine, a half gill of hot water, one teaspoon currant jelly, one ounce finely chopped lean, raw ham, a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and two tablespoons cognac. Mix well and place the chops again in the pan. Thoroughly drain the prunes and add to the pan with the chops. Tightly cover the cocotte and set in the oven for forty minutes. Remove and serve with the cover on.
A straightforward braise, but the original assumes a cook who already knows what temperature a covered earthenware dish wants and how long veal chops can stand it. A few conversions and one warning about the veal.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given at all. A covered cocotte of this kind is best judged at a moderate heat, in the region of 325-350F, enough to hold a bare simmer under the lid without reducing the small quantity of liquid to nothing.
- A gill and a saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so the sauce is 1/2 cup Zinfandel plus 1/4 cup hot water. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, here of grated nutmeg.
- The cocotteAn earthen cocotte is a lidded earthenware casserole; a small Dutch oven or any heavy lidded pot that goes from burner to oven works. The lid must seat tightly, since the whole braise runs on well under a cup of liquid.
- Veal chops and the forty minutesModern veal chops from the rib or loin are thick, tender and lean, and forty minutes of braising after ten minutes of frying will dry them out. Shoulder or arm chops, which have connective tissue to soften, are the cut that rewards this treatment; with loin chops, check at 20-25 minutes.
- "A sound bean garlic"One whole, unblemished clove of garlic, left intact and fished out before the sauce is built, along with the shallots. The point is perfume, not garlic flavour in the finished dish.
- Lean, raw hamAn uncooked dry-cured ham, prosciutto or speck rather than anything from the deli boiled-ham counter. One ounce, chopped fine, is there for salt and depth; account for it before adding more salt.
- The cognacTwo tablespoons go into the sauce unlit and cook off in the oven. There is no flambé step here, and adding one would cost you liquid you cannot spare.
- PrunesCalifornia dried prunes are today's ordinary pitted prunes; three per chop. Soaking overnight then draining well matters, because prunes added dry will pull moisture out of an already scant sauce.
- YieldSix chops, six servings. Serve straight from the pot as directed, with something plain alongside; the sauce is concentrated and there is not much of it.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, filled The International Cook Book with dishes tagged by place, and the name here is earned by two ingredients rather than by any San Francisco restaurant tradition. Zinfandel was the workhorse red grape of California by the late nineteenth century, and dried prunes were the state's great fruit export, grown in quantity in the Santa Clara Valley and shipped east in barrels and boxes. A New York cook opening this book in 1906 could buy both without difficulty, which is rather the point: such recipes trade on ingredients that had become nationally available by rail. The pairing of veal with prunes, redcurrant jelly and a splash of spirit is otherwise pure French braising practice of the period, the kind of sweet-sour brown sauce Filippini would have known well.