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Veal Chops with Fines Herbes
Neatly trim and flatten six tender white veal chops. Mix on a plate a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, saltspoon grated nutmeg, and with it season chops all around. Thoroughly heat a tablespoon melted butter in sautoir, add chops one beside another and briskly cook for five minutes on each side. Take up butter from pan and place it in another sautoir, then pour in pan chops, one gill broth, and let reduce on fire to a glaze, pour in a half gill white wine, shuffle pan and keep hot. Finely chop four fine, small shallots and add to sautoir with butter, gently brown for two minutes, then add two finely chopped, well-cleaned fresh mushrooms, a half ounce finely chopped raw ham, and cook for five minutes. Pour in a half gill demi-glace lightly mix, add a half teaspoon chopped parsley, lightly mix again, cook for five minutes, dress chops on a hot dish, pour contents of pan over and serve.
A straightforward sauté with a pan sauce, written in Edwardian restaurant shorthand. Two pans are in play at once, and the sequence only makes sense if you keep that straight.
- The two-pan moveAfter the chops are browned, the butter is spooned out into a second pan, where the shallot-mushroom-ham garnish is cooked. The chops stay in the first pan and are deglazed with broth, reduced to a glaze, then given the wine. The two are combined only at the end, over the plated chops.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so the broth is 1/2 cup and the wine and demi-glace 1/4 cup each. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon; with nutmeg, err toward 1/8.
- SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan. Any wide, heavy skillet works, but you want one that holds six chops in a single layer without crowding, or the meat steams instead of browning.
- Five minutes a side assumes thin chopsThe chops are trimmed and flattened first, though no thickness is given. Modern rib or loin veal chops run an inch or more and will not cook through in ten minutes. Either pound them thin as directed or cook thicker chops to 145F internal and rest them.
- Raw hamUncooked cured ham -- prosciutto, speck or unsmoked pancetta. Half an ounce is a seasoning, not a filling; chop it very fine so it melts into the garnish.
- Demi-glaceA rich reduced brown sauce, thick and glossy (classically espagnole reduced with brown stock; in modern kitchens usually just a heavily reduced brown veal stock). Good jarred demi-glace or veal glace diluted to sauce consistency is the practical substitute; plain broth will not give the body the dish depends on.
- The name overpromisesClassic fines herbes is parsley, chervil, chives and tarragon. This version uses parsley only, reflecting an older, looser usage in which 'aux fines herbes' often took in a chopped shallot-and-mushroom mixture close to duxelles. Adding a little chervil or tarragon at the end is defensible and in keeping.
- YieldSix chops, so six servings, with potatoes or a green vegetable. The sauce is a scant quantity by design -- a few spoonfuls per chop.
The International Cook Book is the work of Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and this recipe shows the professional habits of that kitchen: two pans working in parallel, a deglaze reduced "to a glaze," and a finish leaning on demi-glace held ready from the day's stockpot. Veal was the natural meat for such treatment in the period, mild enough to carry shallot, mushroom and nutmeg without competing, and the pale "white veal" specified was prized to the point of being a mark of quality. The phrase aux fines herbes had a looser sense in nineteenth-century French cooking than the fixed quartet of parsley, chervil, chives and tarragon codified later; here it signals a chopped aromatic garnish generally, which is why parsley alone suffices. Filippini's book was assembled for American households that aspired to restaurant cooking, and it assumes throughout that a cook simply has demi-glace on hand.