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July 13
Menu: Cream of Peanut Soup; Veal Chops; Mashed Potatoes String Beans; Onion Salad; Meringues Filled with Custard; Coffee Veal Chops-Trim neatly 8 chops and put into frying pan with 4 tablespoons Crisco, and fry over quick fire a nice brown color. As the meat will afterwards be cooked again, the frying process should be done quickly without actually cooking the chops. Place them between 2 boards, put weight not too heavy over top, and keep them until cold. Strain Crisco, and keep for further use. Cut 1/2 cup pork and 1/2 cup beef marrow into small pieces, pound in mortar; when fine, add 1 tablespoon anchovy paste, 1 teaspoon powdered savory herbs, 1 yolk egg, and piece of Crisco about size of nutmeg. Pound thoroughly until smooth, season with pepper and salt, rub through sieve, and cover side of each chop thickly with this. Put them on Criscoed baking sheet, cover with few fried breadcrumbs, sprinkle with melted Crisco and place in hot oven for 10 minutes. Dish up chops in circle on hot dish, and serve.
A two-stage dish in the French style: the chops are seared, pressed flat and chilled, then masked with a raw forcemeat and finished in a hot oven. The original assumes you know that the second cooking has to be brief enough not to dry the veal but long enough to cook the paste.
- The hinge: cook the forcemeat throughThe coating contains raw pork and raw egg yolk, spread thickly, and ten minutes in a hot oven may not take it past a safe temperature. Spread it thinner than the text implies and check the paste itself reaches 160F, not just the chop beneath it.
- Oven temperature"Hot oven" in a book of this date is usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F. Ten minutes at that heat browns the crumbs and sets the farce; a lower oven will leave the paste pallid and undercooked.
- "Quick fire"High heat in a heavy pan, roughly two minutes a side, purely to colour the surface. The chops should still be raw at the centre when they come out, because they get a second cooking.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold and interchangeable here with lard. Any neutral fat with a high smoke point works for the searing; use softened shortening or butter for brushing the crumbs.
- "Piece about size of nutmeg"A whole nutmeg is only a teaspoon or two by volume. That is all the fat the forcemeat needs to bind.
- Beef marrowAsk a butcher for marrow bones and scoop the marrow out, or soak split bones in cold water an hour and push it free. Yield varies a great deal with the cut, so buy more bone than you think you need for half a cup. If unavailable, use an equal quantity of firm pork back fat, though the texture is coarser.
- The half cup of porkFresh pork, not cured, cut small and pounded to a paste. A food processor does in seconds what the mortar did in minutes, but pulse rather than run it or the fat smears.
- Pressing between boardsThis flattens the chops to an even thickness and firms them so the paste will stay put. Two plates with a can on top, an hour in the refrigerator, is enough; heavy weight squeezes out juices.
- YieldEight chops serve four. The recipe intends the whole quantity of forcemeat to go onto the eight chops, spread thickly.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, for Procter & Gamble, which had launched Crisco in 1911 as the first widely marketed all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening; its Calendar of Dinners supplied a year of menus with the new fat worked into every course, including one as unlikely as this. The dish itself is older than the shortening: coating a sealed, chilled cutlet with a pounded forcemeat and crumbs before a final blast of heat is a French-derived method familiar in nineteenth-century English kitchens, and it resembles cutlets a la Maintenon, though the two are not the same preparation. The beef marrow and anchovy paste are the period details, marrow being a common richening agent in Victorian and Edwardian forcemeats, and anchovy a routine savoury seasoning in an Anglo-American kitchen.