Veal Rolls with Anchovy Fillets and Mozzarella
We really love veal scaloppine and cutlets, so I was excited about learning and trying a new preparation for veal.
When reading any new recipe, I always read through the list of ingredients before grocery shopping to make sure I have everything I need. For many recipes NOT in The Essentials of Italian Cooking, I OFTEN tweak the recipe, either to put my own spin on things, or to add an ingredient I like or delete something that doesn’t work for me. But we Pomodori do NOT make changes to Marcella’s perfected dishes!
A few weeks ago, I confessed my aversion to tomatoes (and beans). Marcella said, “Palma, you make me weep. No fagioli in your life, no oven-browned tomatoes, no pure tomato sauces?” Well, this recipe had, you guessed it, a tiny bit of Italian plum tomatoes. I couldn’t make Marcella cry, now could I? I bought the can of imported plum tomatoes. I figured, “It’s only a third of a cup for the whole recipe! I can do this! The other ingredients will mask the tomato flavor.”
Suprisingly, with my somewhat picky tastes, I loved all the other ingredients: anchovies, parsley, fresh buffalo mozzarella. I also love to deglaze with Marsala and sniff the wonderful aroma that it produces in the kitchen.
Kim and Jan did a great job of photographing the “pounding process” of the veal. I really appreciated Marcella’s directions for FLATTENING the scaloppine. I shudder to think how many cutlets I have beaten the hell out of over the years!
A sauce is made with butter, smashed anchovy fillets, parsley, pepper, and the tomatoes. It is spread over the veal slices, topped with thinly sliced fresh buffalo mozzarella, rolled and tied like a package with kitchen twine.
I have a HUGE roll of kitchen twine that was my mom’s! She passed away in 1984, and I am still using it! I have fond memories of helping her in the kitchen as a child, and holding down the string with my finger as she rolled roasts and tied the knots. My mom would say that using the twine was like “wrapping gifts from the kitchen”. I am sure I cannot use all of this twine in my lifetime.
The rolled veal “gifts” are lightly dredged in a little flour immediately before going into the pan with foamy butter. When the rolls are removed, Marsala is added to the pan to make an aromatic sauce for the veal rolls be turned in.
The filling is lovely, tomatoes and all. The perfect blending of the anchovies, butter and parsley, and the addition of the mozzarella kept me from even knowing they were there! The Marsala “sauce” is fabulous with the whole thing. This recipe was fun, easy, and really delicious. I will definitely make it again! I have more scaloppine, so I look forward to trying some of the other recent recipes.
Palma, I love the story of your mother’s kitchen twine and “gifts from the kitchen”. She sounds like she was a very special person.
Your descriptions stir my appetite. I think I’ll make veal rolls this weekend. I have already made scaloppine once this week, the only meat I cooked for Victor who had surgery on Monday and is supposed to avoid anything heavy for a few days. Although there is very little in my cooking that I consider heavy. It’s the quantity that makes a meal either light or weighty. At our age, we have only one full meal a day, at midday, just coffee in the morning, and sometimes only fruit for dinner.
Like Susie, I was touched by the reference to kitchen twine. I have had two balls of it for years. We no longer do all that trussing.
Brava, Palma!
Palma, this looks delicious. Beth, Irene, & I bought huge boxes of veal, but I may have to buy more to make all the recipes that keep pouring out of this chapter. Every new one looks more wonderful than the one before.