Cotoletta alla milanese Period COrigin theory CVerified

The fried cutlet of Milan

Cotoletta alla Milanese is a regional dish of Milan, in the Lombardy region of northern Italy. A bone-in veal chop is coated in flour and breadcrumbs, then fried in butter or oil until it turns a deep gold. The crust is fragrant, the meat inside tender. Today it is one of the dishes most closely identified with Milan.

Both the veal at its center and the wheat in its coating were long-established local foods. In dairy-rich Lombardy, veal was a familiar sight on the table, and wheat grew in the same country. Dredging the meat, pressing on a coat of breadcrumbs, and frying it in plenty of fat is what gives the dish its face. The same handwork appears in Vienna's schnitzel, and the two stand as close cousins within the family of breaded, fried cutlets.

The written record reaches back a long way. A twelfth-century monastery document from Milan has been read as mentioning a veal dish of this kind. Whether that line describes today's breaded cutlet, however, is far from clear. The present style of a bone-in veal chop fried until fragrant is set down plainly as a Milanese dish only much later, at the very end of the nineteenth century.

The tale of a general who carried it home

A well-worn anecdote clings to the cotoletta. In the nineteenth century, so the story goes, the Austrian Field Marshal Radetzky, stationed in northern Italy, came upon this fried cutlet in Milan and carried the recipe back to Vienna, where it became the Wiener schnitzel. It is a tidy story, drawing a single line between two famous dishes.

But the tale has nothing behind it. The linguist Heinz-Dieter Pohl, who followed the trail of the anecdote, found that the story linking Radetzky to the schnitzel first surfaces in an 1869 travel guide, and that nothing in the records connected to the field marshal leaves any trace of it. The Count Attems who appears in the anecdote is not to be found in the Habsburg registers of names. Dressed up as an old tradition, it is better understood as a later fabrication. The dates do not line up either: Vienna's breaded veal schnitzel already appears in Maria Anna Neudecker's cookbook of 1831, a full quarter-century before the 1857 date on which the general is supposed to have brought it home.

So which one actually came first? Here it is worth being plain: that is still not known. On one side stands a reading of the phrase lombolos cum panitio (loin of veal with bread) recorded in a Milanese monastery document of 1134, taken as evidence that the ancestor of the breaded veal cutlet lay in Milan. Yet whether that line means 'veal in a breadcrumb coat' or 'meat served with bread' is disputed among scholars. Under its present name, the fried cutlet is written down plainly only in 1891, in Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina. On the other side, some hold that Vienna's schnitzel grew up independently, out of a local lineage of breaded fried fowl. Whether one preceded the other, or the two influenced each other, the surviving records cannot decide.

What is certain is that once the single thread of the Radetzky tale unravels, what remains is not a neat answer but a landscape of two similar dishes standing side by side. Rather than rush to say who copied whom, it is better to accept that the lineage of these close cousins is still an open question.