Master this Amazing Cote de Veau en Papillote
Side of veal cooked in paper, or papillote de veau
Drilling down through the menus printed in the Treasury of Great Recipes is culinary archeology. These are the recipes that carried great restaurants when aspic was a thing and you could smoke at your table. Most dishes focused on flesh. If you asked for a vegetarian option the waiter would sneer and smack you in the face with a fist full of celery.
Some of the best recipes of the Treasury are hiding in the menus
The first eight dishes at the top of the menu for Lasserre (page 42 and 43 in French Cuisine) are red meat and duck. The next dish is Quartier d’Agneau Persille Pommes Nouvelles (lamb quarters with parsley and new apples) then Pintadeau enter roti (roast guinea fowl). It’s a heavy menu. Number 5 is la cote de veau en papillote and it’s one of the simplest dishes on the page.
la cote de veau en papilliote
Cooking en papillote is classic French technique and a sneaky way to amp up the presentation and flavors of a dish without adding a lot of work. This technique soars when you change the paper for clay or salt, but those methods do add more work. Paper is a cinch. In a previous recipe, I linked you to Bon Appetit's video which explains how to en papillote just about anything. It's straight forward and easy, just like this technique.
Ok, yeah, la cote de veau en papillote uses veal
Which you may be opposed to and that’s understandable. Meat means slaughter. There’s no way around that. Vegetarians and vegans uphold some very sturdy arguments against the consumption of meat, primarily because of the inherent cruelty of killing animals. So even if you are a carnivore who’s worked out your ethical position on the fleshy side of the equation, you’ll have a hard time defending the consumption of veal.
Because veal is worse
There are gradations of veal and I assure you they are like the descending levels of hell from Dante’s Inferno and I’m just not going to explain that. Essentially, veal is beef from male dairy calves. They are not useful to a dairy farmer because you can’t milk them. So the farmer’s sell them to butchers in the first few months–or weeks–of their short lives.
In the 80s, veal farming was the poster child for animal cruelty. The campaign against veal was successful—people were horrified by it and veal sales plummeted. Since then, farmers have worked hard to redeem veal by implementing cruelty-free farming and slaughtering techniques but it hardly matters. Sales are in the ditch. Add to that the general decline of the beef industry and the emerging decline in dairy sales and suddenly veal’s kind of hard to find at your local store. In this recipe, you can easily swap regular beef for veal in your la cote de veau en papillote and not much changes except you feel better about it an somewhere a baby cow gets it wings.
We just don’t eat like that any more
White linen dining in the early 60s was still the late 50s and it was awful. I am old enough to have dined out in the late 60s as a child. It was like this: everyone smoked. They smoked before the meal, they smoked during the meal, and they smoked after the meal like they’d just had a threesome with weightlifters. At least one dish was staring at you from a horrific jiggling translucent carapace of an aspic. Vegetables were served as if the restaurant was checking off some kind of official municipal form—like if they didn’t serve a vegetable they’d get shut down. In the middle of the road joints, everything was steamed or boiled to within an inch of its life and mixed with cream or bacon. Even the veggies were meat. Look at this horror.
Let’s cook some goddam la cote de veau en papillote, people
You’re going to need veal—unless you’ve googled it and watched any of the videos in which case you’re not reading this anymore because you threw your iPad into a wall. However, there really are farmers who take better care of veal calves. Try Bobolink Dairy in N.J. (be warned, their website is from 2004) or Marcho Farms (recommended by the American Veal Association). The recipe I worked from—and most of the recipes I looked at to research this dish–used bone-in veal chops like the Milanese chops shown here. You want one per person unless they are really small, then get two per.
If the chops aren’t Frenched by the butcher, do yourself a favor and clean the meat off the end of the bones so your chops have a ‘handle’ like a hanger steak (the Flintstonian version). But it’s papillote de veau, so it’ll be a small handle.