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Minuten Fleisch
(Germany.) Slice 1 1/2 pounds of tender veal very thin; cut into 4-inch squares and season to taste. Put in a pan with 1/2 cup of claret, and, when well steeped, take out, dip in flour, and lay in a buttered pan with some parsley, half a cup of consomme, and the juice of a lemon. Bake 40 minutes, or until tender, and serve with the sauce around.
A short list of instructions that hides one real problem: the name promises minutes and the method asks for forty. Read the timing as a maximum for thick cutlets, not a rule.
- The hinge: cooking timeVeal sliced "very thin" is done in a matter of minutes, and forty minutes in a hot buttered pan will leave it grey and dry. Judge by the meat, not the clock — thin escalopes need roughly 8 to 12 minutes covered in a moderate oven, and only cutlets a half-inch or more thick approach the original time.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was usual in cookbooks of this period. Treat it as a moderate oven, 350F, and cover the pan so the small amount of liquid steams the meat rather than evaporating in the first ten minutes.
- ClaretIn period usage claret means red Bordeaux, or any dry red in that style. A half cup is a marinade rather than a braising liquid; 20 to 30 minutes of steeping is enough for veal this thin, and longer will tint it dull purple.
- ConsommeHalf a cup of clear, well-seasoned beef or veal stock. Canned broth works, but reduce it slightly first — commercial broth is thinner and saltier than a household consomme would have been.
- "4-inch squares"The recipe says only "tender veal"; a lean cut such as leg or loin suits it. These are escalope-sized pieces, not neat geometry. Pound them lightly between paper if they vary in thickness so they finish together.
- The flour coatDip the meat straight from the wine and flour it just before it goes in the pan. Flour left sitting on wet veal turns to paste and will thicken the pan liquid into gluey streaks instead of a light sauce.
- LemonThe juice of one lemon against half a cup each of wine and stock is assertive. Add half, taste the sauce at the end, and finish with the rest if it needs lifting.
- YieldA pound and a half of veal serves four. Spoon the pan juices around the meat rather than over it, as the original directs — the floured surface goes soft under sauce.
Minutenfleisch is simply "minute meat": German kitchen shorthand for thin slices cooked fast in a hot pan, the same logic that gives Austrian cooking its Minutenschnitzel. The gap between that name and a forty-minute bake suggests the dish reached print at some remove from a German kitchen, though nothing here identifies who transmitted it or how. The claret steeping and the consomme finish are the kind of hotel-French vocabulary common in turn-of-the-century English-language cookbooks, where European dishes were often given a little wine and a little stock in translation. Veal suited it well — pale, lean, sold in thin cuts, and more common on the table then than it is now.