I still remember that while traveling with my parents in the USSR, if there was no steak or chicken tobacco in a cafe or restaurant, they ordered... brizol.
Brizol was one of the hits of Soviet catering, and not even a canteen one, but a higher rank: a cafe (not self-service), restaurants - during the day for sure (in the evening we did not go there because not all restaurants could be entered with children and teenagers if who remembers).
I don’t know if it was because of the taste it was so popular, or because of the name (there is still either a myth, or that, they say, brizol is French cuisine).
Brizol in those days was different. Sometimes it was a piece of chicken breast, most often beaten off, fried in a leison without flour or rusk breading. Sometimes - a chicken cutlet in the same processing.
Which one was correct?
Especially I found a technological map of brizoli (from a collection published by "Economics" in 1983). It is called “Fried brizol, semi-finished culinary product (CP-recipe No. 732)”.
The description of the manufacturing procedure, frankly, surprised me, we have never come across anything similar to such a product. A simple cutlet in a lioness - there have been, yes. But so that minced meat is made from frozen chicken fillet, mayonnaise, eggs, wheat flour, salt and spices are added to it, round cutlets with a diameter of 12 are cut centimeters, and when frying, one beaten egg is additionally left for each such cutlet (first, the cutlet is dipped in it, it is watered with the rest)... No, I haven't try.
If you cook, then you need to observe one more trick: first, the brizols are fried to a crust, and then brought to readiness in a steam convection oven - 12-15 minutes at a temperature of 170 degrees.
But I started by saying that personally this dish raises a lot of questions for me! The mere presence of mayonnaise in the minced meat is already annoying me. It's like with meat in French, in which there is mayonnaise, cheese, and so on, but in France they have not heard of it.
So here too... Brizol, of course, sounds very French, and in general - they say that brizol is a way cooking any product fried in an egg (alas, I don't know French, I won't judge it correctly or no).
But here's the strangeness - Dumas, for example, does not write anything about brizols in his culinary dictionary. And Dumas, as you know, was very fond of food and knew how. And he was interested in cooking.
So, Dumas mentions not about brizols, but about bresol! Its recipe is strange and little understood. So is the source of the recipe. Dumas claims that it was invented by a lackey of a certain Marquis de Bresol during the Seven Years War. It was not possible to establish where this marquis was from, I did not find any other references to him. And not only his, but in general the name "Brezol" did not flicker in the European chronicles, at least those that are available to everyone. Maybe somewhere in the archives - there is something about him ...
But I have a suspicion that the Marquis de Bresol is Dumas' invention, as well as the recipe.
Dumas wrote:
Here is his recipe in the form in which it is presented by chefs worthy of respect and trust:
- Put a slice of ham on the bottom of a saucepan, add oil, add finely chopped parsley, small onions, mushrooms, a clove of garlic, mix well with oil. Place three layers of thinly sliced veal fillets on top until oil appears on the surface of the meat. Sprinkle each layer with salt and pepper. When the dish is ready, you can make as many layers as you like; it is only important that each layer of meat is soaked in oil mixed with spices, just like the very first layer. Peel off the layers one by one and transfer to another pan. Remove the fat from the sauce, add a little flour or, even better, a few boiled and crushed chestnuts, pour the sauce over your slices and heat but don't boil. Veal, lamb, and especially lamb are good for making shreds.
This recipe, as I suspect, was named precisely because of the way of cooking - slow braisé stewing.
Some argue that the term "brizol" did not come from France at all, but from England, but I, again, could not find any confirmation of this.
But there is another version, and it is that brizol is a purely Soviet (quite possibly, having roots in pre-Soviet culinary history) invention. The fact is that the word "brizol" is very reminiscent of the distorted Italian "braciole", that is, a chop ...
Which version seems most likely to you?