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Veal Cutlets
(Vienna.) Slice, pare, and flatten 2 pounds of veal, add salt, pepper, and dip them in egg and bread-crumbs. Fry them in bacon fat, and arrange on a dish with 1/2 a teaspoonful of capers on each, and a garnish of anchovies, sliced lemon, and parsley. Serve with potato salad.
This is Wiener schnitzel in shorthand, with the Holstein-style garnish of capers and anchovy standing in for the more familiar plain lemon. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how thin the meat must be and how hot the fat.
- Pound it thinner than you think"Flatten" here means about 1/4 inch or less — Viennese practice takes the cutlet down to roughly 4 mm between sheets of plastic or parchment, using the flat side of a mallet rather than the toothed side. Thin meat cooks through in the time the crumb takes to brown, which is the whole point of the dish.
- What cut to buyTwo pounds of veal cut for cutlets means leg or top round, sliced across the grain into escalopes. Ask for veal scaloppine and have them cut about 1/2 inch thick before pounding; four to six pieces will serve four.
- "Pare" means trimRemove the silverskin and any surrounding membrane. Left on, it contracts in the pan and curls the cutlet away from the fat, giving you pale patches where the crumb never browns.
- The breading sequenceThe recipe omits the first step: flour, then egg, then crumbs. Dry flour gives the egg something to grip, and without it the coating slides off in the pan. Use fine dry breadcrumbs, not fresh, and press them on lightly rather than packing them down — a loose crumb is what lets the coating puff away from the meat.
- Bacon fat and heatBacon fat is what the recipe calls for, though lard or clarified butter are the more usual choices for schnitzel. Use enough that the cutlets float rather than sit — about 1/2 inch in the pan — at around 340–350F. Fry two to three minutes a side, spooning fat over the top, and drain on paper.
- Cook in batchesCrowding drops the fat temperature and steams the crust. Hold finished cutlets uncovered on a rack in a 200F oven; covering them traps steam and softens the coating within a minute or two.
- The garnishHalf a teaspoon of capers per cutlet, drained; rolled or flat anchovy fillets; a slice of lemon and a sprig of parsley. Dress the potato salad in the Austrian manner with hot stock, vinegar and oil rather than mayonnaise, which is the usual Austrian style.
- YieldServes four as a main course.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a genre of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks that collected dishes gathered on European travel and labelled each with its city, which is why this one carries the parenthetical "(Vienna.)" rather than a name. What it describes is Wiener schnitzel, the breaded veal cutlet that had become Vienna's signature dish over the course of the nineteenth century; the often-repeated story that it descends from Milanese cotoletta brought north by Field Marshal Radetzky is traditional and not documented. The capers and anchovies are not standard on plain schnitzel but belong to the dressed-up variants that circulated in the same period, the best known of which, Schnitzel Holstein, adds a fried egg as well. The pairing with cold potato salad, though, is entirely orthodox and remains so in Austria today.