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Veal Cutlets, Chasseur
Neatly trim and flatten six tender veal cutlets. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, well divided all around. Thoroughly heat one tablespoon leaf lard in a large frying pan, arrange the cutlets one beside another in the pan and briskly fry for five minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish. Remove all the fat from the pan, then add six finely chopped shallots, half gill white wine, six sliced canned mushrooms, one gill demi-glace and half gill tomato sauce; gently mix, let the sauce boil for five minutes, pour it over the cutlets, sprinkle half teaspoon chopped parsley over all and serve.
A straightforward pan-fry with a quick reduction sauce built in the same pan. The only real obstacles are two archaic measures and the demi-glace.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. So half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup, one gill of demi-glace is 1/2 cup, and half a gill of tomato sauce is another 1/4 cup.
- Demi-glace is the hingeEverything the sauce tastes like comes from this half cup. Use a good reduced brown veal or beef stock, or a commercial demi-glace concentrate diluted to a syrupy consistency. Thin canned broth will give you shallots floating in wine.
- Leaf lardRendered fat from around the pig's kidneys, mild and clean-tasting. Ordinary lard, clarified butter or a neutral oil all work; one tablespoon for six cutlets is sparing, and two is more realistic in a modern pan.
- Cutlet thickness"Flatten" suggests pounding thin, perhaps around 1/4 inch, between sheets of plastic. At that thickness the recipe's five minutes a side is too long; check the meat earlier and adjust the timing to the thickness you have.
- Pan capacitySix flattened cutlets "one beside another" needs a very large skillet, or two batches. Crowding steams the meat and you lose the browned residue the sauce depends on.
- Canned mushroomsStandard at the time and perfectly usable, but 4 oz of sliced fresh mushrooms browned in the pan fat before you deglaze gives a much better sauce.
- YieldSix cutlets, six servings. The sauce comes to about a cup total before reduction, which is a modest spoonful each; make half again as much if you are serving potatoes or rice under it.
Chasseur is French for hunter, and the name attaches to a family of brown sauces built on shallots, white wine, mushrooms and tomato finished into a demi-glace, part of the classic French sauce repertoire codified in the nineteenth century; the usual origin stories for the sauce are tradition rather than documented fact. It is associated with game, but by the time this book was compiled it was applied to almost anything that could be fried quickly in a pan: veal, chicken, kidneys, tournedos. Its appearance here says less about hunting than about the reach of French professional cooking around 1900, when a kitchen that already had demi-glace and tomato sauce made up could produce a dish like this in the time it took to fry the meat.