[Sca-cooks] pounded meat slices

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Stefan li Rous:
>Chirhart mentioned:
>>Pork tenderloin cut thick pounded flat dipped in milk and egg.Then dredged
>>in flour and bread crumbs salt and pepper then deep fried in peanut oil.
>>Served on a soft Italian bun with onion,tomato and lettuce and garlic mayo.
>
>Okay, this sounds very like chicken-fried steak except with a different meat.
>I remember hearing mention of taking chicken breasts and pounding them flatter
>as well and I seem to remember my mother doing vener snitzel(sp?)

Wiener Schnitzel, as in, Cutlet in the Vienna Style.

>  this way. In
>this case, why start with a thick slice of meat and then pound it flat? Why
>not just start with thinner sliced meat? Does the pounding tenderize it? (my
>expectation) or is this simply for appearance reasons?

The pounding does tenderize it, by breaking down some of the fibers
of connective tissue (also the meat itself, to some extent: as I
believe Nicolo mentioned, it is akin to pre-chewing). In the case of
some chicken-fried steak recipes that I've seen (yeah, I know we don'
need no steenkeeng recipes for chicken-fried steak) there seems to be
a technique whereby the steak is pounded, floured, then pounded
again, to work the flour into the surface. These are the old ones
where you use the edge of a saucer to whack the meat.

As was pointed out by Isabella, another consideration is that, in a
dish where you're going for a sort of pan-crusty effect, surface area
is an issue, and this does make the slices larger. On the other hand,
they also shrink in the cooking, so usually my own experience has
been that what you end up with is not all that much larger than what
you started out with, when all is said and done. But there's a small
difference.

>Do we have mentions of pounding meats flatter in the period documents?

I could be wrong, as I don't have it in front of me, but I think that
the faux birds made of veal leg slices in Taillevent, or one of the
later descendants of that recipe, call for pounding. This sticks in
my excuse for a mind because I remember that when I made them for 150
people several years ago, I had the butcher slice my meat on the deli
slicer, and remembered that that technique, apart from the obvious,
was divergent from the original recipe. Maybe someone with the text
handy could let us know.

Adamantius