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Breast of Veal
(A German recipe.) Cut into pieces a fine breast of veal, add salt, pepper, 2 onions, and 2 carrots, sliced, some parsley, thyme, and a bayleaf. Add also sufficient water to cover, and cook, with a lid on the pan, 1 hour. Take out the veal, remove the bones from each piece, and dip it in butter and bread-crumbs. Broil these cutlets, and when brown, serve with a sauce of the gravy, strained and seasoned with a tablespoonful of vinegar and two tablespoonfuls of pickled and chopped gherkins.
A two-stage recipe: the breast is poached in an aromatic broth, then boned, crumbed and browned, with the cooking liquid turned into a sharp gherkin sauce. The hinge is the poaching — breast of veal is a tough, sinewy cut and the hour given here is usually not enough.
- Cook it until it is actually tenderBreast of veal is layered muscle, fat and cartilage over rib bones. Keep it at a bare simmer for 1½ to 2 hours, until the bones can be pulled free with no resistance. Boiling hard toughens the meat and clouds the broth you need for the sauce.
- Buy the right cutAsk for veal breast, bone in, roughly 3 to 4 lb, cut across into serving pieces. Butchers often sell it whole or as riblets; either works, and the bones are what give the broth body.
- Bone it while warmThe bones slip out easily at poaching heat and stubbornly once cold. Bone the pieces as soon as you can handle them, then press them flat under a plate and let them cool before crumbing — cold, firm meat holds the coating far better.
- "Dip it in butter"Melted butter, used as the glue for the crumbs in place of egg. Brush or dip, then press into fine dry breadcrumbs.
- "Broil" in 1902"Broil" -- Direct heat over coals or in a gridiron. Under a modern broiler set high, or in a heavy pan with a little clarified butter, allow 3 to 4 minutes a side — the meat is already cooked, so this step is only for colour.
- The sauceStrain the poaching liquid, then reduce it hard — a litre of thin broth will not taste of anything until it has boiled down to a cup or so. Add the vinegar and gherkins off the heat so the gherkins keep their bite.
- GherkinsVinegar-pickled cornichons, not sweet or dill-cured American pickles, which will throw the sauce off balance. Chop them fine.
- YieldA 3 to 4 lb breast, boned, feeds four generously. Serve with boiled potatoes or buttered noodles to take the sauce.
This is Kalbsbrust in an everyday German manner, and the two-step method — poach the cheap cut, then crumb and brown it — is akin to the thrift of Austrian kitchens, where boiled beef is often crumbed and fried a second day. The sauce belongs to a family of sharp German cucumber and gherkin sauces (Gurkensauce) whose job is to cut the flatness of veal and the richness of butter and crumbs. Its presence in a book of foreign recipes gathered for English-speaking readers is characteristic of a period when compilers looked abroad for dishes, and German household cooking was admired for this kind of frugality, using a bony breast rather than a chop and wasting none of the broth.