Veal Chops
Trim the bone as with lamb chops and fry, dipping in beaten egg and bread or cracker crumbs. Add a little parsley and a minced shallot to the gravy.
A terse turn-of-the-century note that assumes you already know how to bread and pan-fry a chop. The gaps worth filling are the cut, the fat, the doneness and what "the gravy" means here.
- Trimming the bone"Trim the bone as with lamb chops" most likely means frenching: scraping the end of the rib bone clean of meat and membrane so it stays pale during frying. The instruction implies a rib chop; a loin chop has bone but no rib end to trim, and the recipe gives no thickness.
- The breading sequenceThe original skips the flour step, which is what makes egg adhere to damp meat. Pat the chops dry, dust with seasoned flour, then egg, then crumbs, and let them rest ten minutes before frying so the coating sets.
- Cracker crumbsPeriod cracker crumbs meant plain soda or water crackers rolled fine; they brown faster and taste saltier than dried breadcrumbs. Either works, but reduce added salt if using crackers.
- Fat and heat"Fry" in recipes of this period generally means shallow frying in butter, lard or drippings rather than deep fat. Medium heat, about 1/4 inch of fat; butter alone will brown the crumbs before the chop is cooked, so cut it with oil or clarify it.
- DonenessVeal chops are done at 145F internal with a short rest; timing depends on the thickness of the chop, which the recipe does not specify. Cooking veal until grey and firm produces exactly the dry chop the breading is meant to prevent.
- The gravyThe recipe refers to "the gravy" without describing one, most likely meaning the pan drippings. Pour off most of the fat, soften the minced shallot in what remains, deglaze with a little stock or white wine, and finish with the parsley off the heat so it stays green.
- YieldOne chop per person, two for large appetites. The breading and pan sauce scale directly, but fry in batches rather than crowding the pan, which steams the crumbs.
Breaded veal chops and cutlets were standard American middle-class cooking by 1900, and the route is usually traced to both French cookery, where the *côtelette panée* was a staple of the repertoire, and to German and Austrian immigrant kitchens where schnitzel-style crumbing was routine. Veal was cheaper and more available then than now, a byproduct of the dairy herds that supplied every city with milk, and general cookbooks of the period treat it as an everyday meat rather than a luxury. The brevity of this entry seems characteristic of the *Twentieth Century Cook Book* and its peers: recipes appear to have been grouped so that a technique explained once, here under lamb chops, could be cross-referenced rather than repeated, and the reader was apparently assumed to know what a fried chop looked like when it was ready. The shallot-and-parsley finish is the one flourish, a small nod to French practice in an otherwise plain instruction.