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Vienna Schnitzels
After providing a two-pound piece from a white, tender leg of veal, cut it into six equal slices and flatten nicely with a cleaver. Season both sides with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika; lightly roll in flour. next in beaten egg and lastly in bread crumbs.
Heat one tablespoon butter in a large frying pan, place the pieces of veal in the pan, one beside another, and fry for eight minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish. Arrange a thin slice of lemon, with a twisted anchovy in oil placed over each slice of lemon, on top of each schnitzel. Serve with one and a half gills hot tomato sauce in a separate bowl.
A straightforward breaded veal cutlet, but two of the original numbers will work against you: the frying time and the amount of butter.
- Eight minutes a side is far too longA cutlet pounded thin cooks through in two to three minutes per side, and the crumb coating will be dark brown well before eight minutes have passed. Fry until the crust is deep gold, then stop; veal held longer than that goes dry and stringy.
- More fat than one tablespoonA single tablespoon in a large pan gives a patchy, scorched crust. Use enough butter, or a mix of butter and neutral oil, to come up a few millimetres in the pan so the coating floats and puffs away from the meat.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of tomato sauce is about three-quarters of a cup — a sauceboat's worth for six cutlets.
- The cutA two-pound piece of leg means the top round or thick flank. Cut across the grain into six slices and pound to about a quarter-inch; six slices from two pounds is generous, so trim or pound wide and thin rather than leaving them thick.
- BreadingPress the crumbs on only lightly and shake off the loose ones. Firmly packed crumbs bond to the meat and give a heavy, sodden jacket instead of the blistered, slightly detached crust that defines the dish.
- PaprikaHalf a teaspoon of paprika over six cutlets is a seasoning note, not a colouring. Use sweet Hungarian paprika if you have it; smoked paprika did not exist in this idiom and will dominate.
- The garnishAnchovies packed in oil are still sold; drain and blot them, then curl one over each lemon slice. Anchovy paste is not a substitute here — the point is the shape and the single salty bite.
- YieldSix cutlets, so three to six servings depending on whether you treat one or two as a portion. Fry in batches and hold on a rack in a low oven rather than crowding the pan, which steams the crust.
The breaded veal cutlet is Vienna's best-known dish abroad, and its origin is traditionally traced to the Milanese cotoletta, said to have been carried north by Austrian officers in the nineteenth century — a story usually attached to Field Marshal Radetzky and generally regarded as unproven. By this period the schnitzel was a fixture on international hotel menus. The lemon-and-anchovy garnish here looks more like restaurant than Viennese home practice; the same restaurant repertoire produced the schnitzel Holstein, with its fried egg and anchovy. Note also the paprika, a Hungarian habit that migrated across the Austro-Hungarian empire and appears in Viennese recipes of this period where a modern Austrian cook would use pepper alone.