Cotoletta alla Milanese

The rules are short and unbending: a rib of veal, bone left in, the meat never pressed thin; bread crumbs, egg, and a bath of clarified butter — never oil, never a fryer. The crust must blister into what the Milanese call the orecchia d'elefante only when the meat is pounded wide, and purists consider even that a tourist's flourish.

Milan and Vienna have argued for two centuries over who breaded a cutlet first. The Milanese case cites a monastery feast menu from 1134 listing lombolos cum panitio — loin with breading — three hundred years before the Wiener Schnitzel had a name. Vienna answers with Field Marshal Radetzky, who supposedly carried the recipe north from occupied Lombardy in the 1850s. The dish, like the city, has survived every occupation intact.

Eat it where we do: at Trattoria Milanese on Day 1, two streets from the hotel, where it arrives gold as the Duomo's Madonnina — and again, wider and prouder, at Antica Trattoria della Pesa on Day 2.