Veal Scallops with Apples, Cream, and Calvados

The equinox has passed and we’re firmly into autumn; that means it’s apple time! My Greenmarket is filled with colorful heaps of old and new apple varieties.

Instead of wading right in with apple pies, tarts, and cakes, I thought I’d start the season with an only moderately apple-y dish. I found a recipe called Veal Scallopini with Cream, Calvados, and Apples in the Beef and Veal volume of the Time-Life Good Cook series. That seemed like a winning flavor combination, so I gave it a try.

The first thing to do was prepare the apples. The recipe said to cut them in ½-inch cubes. Now, there’s a problem in solid geometry: Make even cubes out of a spherical fruit! I guess a professional chef could assign one of his kitchen minions to make perfect tiny apple cubes, but that would waste an awful lot of apple. I achieved small chunks. I tossed them with lemon juice, as instructed, to keep them from discoloring.

The next task was to cook the veal. The recipe called for ½-thick slices, not to be pounded any thinner. That’s an unusually thick cut for a scallopini dish, more like what is properly called a veal cutlet, but I happened to have some that size in the freezer, intended for a different use (old-fashioned veal parmigiana, which I’ll still get around to making one of these days). My recipe said to salt, pepper, flour, and sauté the cutlets in butter and olive oil for 4 minutes to a side, then to keep them warm in an oven while the sauce was being made.

After doing that I added the apples, their lemon juice, and a splash of Calvados to the sauté pan and cooked them, stirring and deglazing, for 3 minutes. The next step was to add cream, cook “until the mixture has turned a rich ivory color,” then lower the heat and cook uncovered “for almost 10 minutes, until the cream has reduced by about half.” Well, my cream mixture turned ivory immediately, and in about 5 minutes it was thick enough so I could retrieve the veal from the oven and pour the sauce over it.

The speed at which the sauce came together was probably because I was cutting a recipe for 6 down to portions for 2, but it was a good thing – because I’d been concerned that keeping the veal waiting in the oven for more than 15 minutes might dry it out. It didn’t, but the brief cooking the thick scallops had received wasn’t enough to tenderize the meat. It was chewy. And just pouring the sauce over the veal meant it hadn’t had enough contact with the other ingredients to absorb any of those flavors into itself. This made a disappointing result for such promising ingredients.

As we ate it, Tom said “You know, we could make a better version of this.” The oracle had spoken, and three days later, we did. Here’s how we changed the recipe:

• Using thin, true veal scallops – only ¼ inch thick
• Cutting the apple pieces smaller
• Flaming the Calvados as soon as it and the apples went into the sauté pan
• Adding ½ cup homemade meat broth and simmering for 2 minutes
• Stirring in the cream, putting the veal back in, cooking 5 minutes covered
• Uncovering and cooking just long enough to reduce the sauce.

And here’s the result:

It didn’t look very different from the original version, but tasted a lot more interesting. The veal was perfectly tender, and it had taken on flavor from the rest of the ingredients – as well as given some of its own rich essence to them.

A valuable lesson, that: Ingredients need time together to blend. Otherwise they remain separate flavors, at best layered on top of each other. I really knew that – how can anyone who has cooked even a little not know that? – but like so much else that we all know, the wisdom needs periodic reinforcement. That’s why it’s always a challenge to try a new recipe: It not only pushes you to break old habits, but it also strengthens the best of them.