Bring out the breadcrumbs - Telegraph Apparently, there's a saying in the restaurant world: 'If you want to sell it, crumb it!' There's something about fried food in a golden crust that is very hard to resist. No matter how grown up you believe yourself to be, breadcrumbs speak to your inner six-year-old, who only wants to eat fish fingers. Almost every food culture seems to have its own version of the schnitzel. The Japanese have tonkatsu, a crumbed cutlet, most often pork, served with a thick curry sauce. Americans have breaded veal chops (and plenty of other breaded things besides). And the Italians have pollo milanese, flattened chicken breast coated in egg and breadcrumbs, sometimes with a little parmesan. You can eat some version of this breadcrumbed chicken in many of the chain restaurants of the British high street, from Carluccio's to Giraffe. It's easy to look down your nose on breaded food, just a bit. A French friend was appalled, when she first arrived in this country, to look in the freezer cabinet and see how much of the fish came coated in lurid orange crumbs. For years I avoided breadcrumbing because of its fast-food connotations. I was missing out. When carefully made, breaded cutlets can be a homely treat. The turning-point came when we ate a lunch cooked by my brother-in-law, who is from Argentina. Alongside clouds of nutmeggy mashed potatoes and a nicely tart salad, he served us beautifully bronzed veal escalopes, coated with breadcrumbs, parsley and garlic. In Buenos Aires, milanesa is a childhood staple. Sometimes it is made with beef, sometimes chicken or veal. Every child believes that their mother's version is the best. The difference, Gonzalo notes with a smile, is that his mother's milanesa really is the best. Breadcrumbing is not an easy option. You have to assemble three different plates, one of flour, one of beaten egg, one of crumbs, and dip the cutlet in each. By the time you reach the second cutlet your fingers will be breadcrumbed too. It's tempting to skip the flour stage, but don't. Cook's Illustrated, an American magazine that performs formidably thorough recipe testing, found that the flouring was essential as it stops the breading from peeling off. Another challenge is the frying stage. If you get the heat too high, the coating will burn before the cutlet inside is cooked. Yet if it's not hot enough, it will become greasy. One solution is to flatten the cutlets really thin, so that they cook faster. Another way is to forget frying and cook them on an oiled preheated baking-tray in the oven. This works very well with aubergine slices. If you have presalted them, crumbed aubergine slices cook to a crispy golden in about 30 minutes - a lovely vegetarian main course with a squeeze of lemon. The crucial question, however, is the crumbs themselves. I tend to use whatever crust is in the bread bin, whizzed in the processor, perhaps with some rosemary or thyme thrown in. I like the irregular quality of crumbs made with real bread, the crustier the better. But the secret ingredient of Gonzalo's special milanesa surprisingly turns out to be Paxo golden breadcrumbs (around 99p from Asda or Tesco), a fine turmeric-gold rubble - the only crumbs, he said, that came close to the milanesa of his childhood.