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Stewed Cutlets
(Scaloppine alla Livornese) Take some slices of tender beef, beat them well and put them in a saucepan with a piece of butter.
When this is all melted, put one or two tablespoonfuls of broth to complete the cooking, season with salt and pepper, add a pinch of flour and before taking them from the fire put in a pinch of chopped parsley. 74
A two-minute pan dish with almost no written detail, which means the cook supplies the judgment. Everything depends on how thin the beef is and how briefly it stays in the pan.
- The hinge: keep it fastScaloppine pounded to about 1/4 inch cook in roughly a minute per side over fairly brisk heat. The instruction to add broth "to complete the cooking" means a moment of steam and a pan sauce, not a stew; beef held longer than a few minutes at this thickness turns grey and tough.
- "Beat them well"Pound the slices between plastic wrap with a flat mallet or the base of a heavy pan until even and thin. Cut from top round, sirloin tip or eye of round, across the grain, and trim any silverskin, which shrinks and curls the slice.
- Unstated quantitiesFigure about 1 lb of beef in six to eight slices, 2 tablespoons butter, and salt and pepper as you go. The recipe gives no amounts at all, as a number of the shorter recipes in this book do not.
- "A piece of butter"Enough to film the pan generously, roughly 2 tablespoons for a 12-inch skillet. Butter alone browns and speckles quickly at scaloppine heat; a spoonful of olive oil with it keeps the milk solids from burning, and is entirely in keeping with the region.
- The pinch of flourAdded loose at the end it will taste raw and go lumpy. Either dust the pounded slices with flour before they go into the butter, or stir the pinch into the melted butter for a few seconds before the broth goes in.
- BrothOne or two tablespoons is barely a deglaze. Use warm unsalted or lightly salted stock and scrape up the browned bits; if you want enough sauce to spoon over, go to 1/4 cup and let it reduce while the meat rests on a warm plate.
- Work in batchesCrowded slices release liquid and poach rather than brown. Two or three pieces at a time in a hot pan, held on a warm plate, then the sauce built at the end and poured over everything.
- Yield and servingServes three to four on the quantities above. Parsley goes in off the heat so it stays green; a squeeze of lemon suits scaloppine, along with bread or plain boiled potatoes to take the small amount of sauce.
Scaloppine is a diminutive of scaloppa, a thin slice cut broad and flat, usually said to share an origin with the French escalope. Alla livornese points to Livorno, the Tuscan port, though the label attaches loosely to a great many dishes and elsewhere often implies tomato; here it signals little more than butter, broth and parsley. The book itself, Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book, was published in New York in 1919 in English for American readers, and its recipes are translated and compressed to a few lines each.