Saltimbocca alla romana

Veal beaten thin, a slice of prosciutto laid over it, a sage leaf, and about three minutes in a hot pan. Artusi has it at 222 and notes it is Roman, which for a Tuscan writer is a small concession.

The name means it jumps into your mouth. The dish is over almost as fast.

Ingredients

Serves 2.

	Metric	Imperial
Veal escalopes, beaten very thin	4, about 300 g	4, about 10 oz
Prosciutto crudo, sliced thin	4 slices	4 slices
Fresh sage leaves	4 large	4 large
Butter	40 g	1.5 oz
Dry white wine	60 ml	2 fl oz
Plain flour	for dusting	for dusting

Beat the veal between two sheets of plastic until it is genuinely thin, three to four millimetres, an eighth of an inch. Thickness is the difference between saltimbocca and a small steak with ham on it.

Method

1. Lay a slice of prosciutto over each escalope and a sage leaf on top. Press them on, or pin the three together with a toothpick, which is what most kitchens do and what the picture above shows. Rome does not roll these; they are flat.
2. Dust the veal side only with flour and shake off the excess.
3. Melt the butter in a wide pan over a good heat until it foams.
4. Lay the escalopes in prosciutto side down. Ninety seconds, no more, until the ham crisps at the edges.
5. Turn them, cook the veal side for a minute, then lift them onto a warm plate.
6. Pour the wine into the hot pan, let it bubble down to a few spoonfuls of glaze, and pour that over. The plate should not swim.

What goes wrong

The veal is tough. Cooked too long. Thin veal needs about two minutes in total, and it goes from done to leather in the third.

The prosciutto falls off. Not pressed on before cooking, or turned too early. The first ninety seconds are what fuse them.

The pan floods. Too much wine, or it was not reduced. What you want is a glaze that coats, not a sauce that pools.

Why it works

Prosciutto is already cured and salted, so it needs no seasoning and gives up enough fat to baste the veal from above while the butter works from below. Flouring only the veal side keeps the ham dry enough to crisp, which is the textural contrast the dish exists for.

At the table

A secondo, and a fast one. It is on almost every trattoria menu in Rome and it is what people order when they want meat without ceremony.

It comes on its own plate with nothing under it. A contorno is ordered separately and arrives separately: cicoria ripassata, puntarelle in season, or roast potatoes. Pasta does not come with it and putting it on top of anything is a foreign habit.

The plate should not swim. The wine in the pan reduces to a few spoonfuls of glaze and that is the whole sauce, so a saltimbocca arriving in a pool of liquid has been finished carelessly or held warm too long.

The name means it jumps into the mouth, which is a claim about how quickly it is eaten rather than about the seasoning.

Veal is the usual meat and pork is a common cheap substitute in Rome, sold honestly as such on a good menu. A white from the Castelli or a Frascati is the ordinary thing to drink with it.

What an Italian would say

In Rome, that it is flat and not rolled, and that rolling it is somebody else's dish wearing its name. That the sage is not garnish and there should be one whole leaf on each piece. And that lemon belongs somewhere else entirely.