French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [211]
LE VEAU
VEAL
One of the most difficult cuts of meat to get a butcher to supply in perfection is an escalope of veal. It should be cut on the bias, in clean, even slices from the topside of the leg of veal, or from the boned loin or fillet without seam, gristle or skin, and weighing a little over 3 oz. each. They should be thin enough not to need the whacking out with a heavy bat with which the majority of butchers finally remove all life and hope from the clumsily hacked lumps of meat which they sell as escalopes. Now, before any of my good and kind friends among London’s butchers rush at me with their steak-beaters, let me add that I am quite well aware that this question of cutting veal escalopes is deeply involved with the economics of butchering. Very briefly, the situation is that the English method of cutting up a leg of veal, crosswise into joints for roasting, precludes the possibility of cutting proper escalopes, because of the seams which run through the meat, whereas the Continental method of separating the leg, lengthways as it were, into the several joints into which it naturally falls produces at least four compact, self-contained cuts, each of which can be used whole as a roasting joint or from which escalopes can be cut. But even this method is still wasteful, because, if the escalopes are properly cut on the bias, there will always be end-pieces too small to do anything much with and which therefore have to be sold with various other bits and pieces as ‘pie veal’ or mince, at a much reduced price. Italian housewives are in the habit of buying these oddments from their butchers and making all sorts of little dishes out of them, and since Italian butchers know that they have a sale for these pieces they are always willing to cut their escalopes in the proper way. In France this can be almost as much of a struggle as it is here, but it is a struggle in which the housewife usually wins, for she knows the penalties of bad cutting.
What has happened here in England is that our demand for cuts of meat which are rapidly prepared and cooked has run ahead of our knowledge of the material with which we are dealing, and the butchers are really no more to blame than the customers who cheerfully pay fantastic prices for meat so ill-cut that however thin and flat it appears after its beating will buckle back to its original shape as soon as it comes into contact with the heat, will consequently cook unevenly and present a most lamentable appearance when it comes to table. To attempt to circumvent this difficulty by having slices of meat cut inch thick and weighing in the region of lb., as I have seen done in restaurants, is again a misunderstanding of the raw material, for these leg cuts of veal are too dry and fatless to be presented like a steak, and although they look nice are stodgy when you come to eat them.
It is for this reason that the French system of larding or piquéing with pork fat thick cuts of veal, such as the fricandeau, a cushion-shaped piece from the leg, or the little steaks called grenadins, also from a leg cut, has arisen. Such cuts are not, of course, for frying-pan cookery, and if frying-pan cookery you must have then it seems to me more satisfactory to call a truce with your butcher over the sore point of escalopes and to buy instead, if he will provide it, a solid piece of that little joint from the leg which is rather the shape of a sausage, which corresponds to the roll of the silverside or gîte à la noix in beef, and which is sometimes, although incorrectly, called the fillet. From this little joint it is easy to cut your own slices of meat into whatever thicknesses you please. Cut very thin and slightly flattened out they constitute the dish which the Italians call scaloppine or frittura piccata, miniature escalopes in fact, which are cooked in a minute or two. Cut about inch thick, like minuscule fillet steaks, they become médaillons, which after a preliminary cooking on each side