Cotoletta alla Milanese

A veal rib chop on the bone, egged, breadcrumbed and fried in clarified butter until the crust is deep gold and the meat inside is just cooked: the cotoletta alla milanese is Milan's defining dish, and the city is particular about every part of that sentence. It is veal, not pork or chicken; it keeps its bone, which is why it is a cotoletta from costola, rib, and not a scaloppina; and it is cooked in butter, not oil. The dispute with Vienna over who fed the recipe to whom has run since the nineteenth century, with a Milanese monastery menu of 1134 listing lombolos cum panitio usually cited as the city's evidence. Two shapes coexist today: the traditional thick chop, two fingers deep and pink at the bone, and the orecchia d'elefante, the elephant's ear, pounded thin and wide enough to cover the plate, boneless and cooked through.