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Cutlets A La Duchesse
Cut the neck of lamb, about two pounds, into cutlets; trim them and scrape the top of bone clean; fry in butter and let them cool. Put into a pan three mushrooms and a sprig of parsley, chopped fine, a piece of butter size of an egg; stir over the fire until very hot; then pour over a cupful of white sauce-the yolks of three eggs well beaten. Stir constantly until about the consistency of thick cream, being very sure that it does not scorch, nor boil. Dip each cutlet into it, covering well with the sauce; again set away to cool. Then dip in egg, and roll in crumbs and fry a pretty brown. Elegant.
A Victorian two-stage cutlet: fry, coat in a thick egg-enriched sauce, chill until the coating sets, then bread and fry again. The chilling is not optional, and it is where most of the time goes.
- The hinge: chill hard between coatsThe sauce coating must set solid before the cutlets are egged and crumbed, or it slides off in the pan. Give them at least an hour in the refrigerator, spaced apart on a tray; two hours is better.
- Neck of lambTwo pounds of neck yields about six to eight small cutlets and needs a butcher. Rack of lamb cut into single-bone chops behaves the same way and is easier to trim; ask for it frenched if you want the clean bone the recipe describes.
- "Butter size of an egg"Roughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. In this quantity of sauce that is generous but not wrong.
- The white sauceA cupful of thick bechamel, not a thin pouring sauce. Make it stiffer than you would for serving, since it has to hold the cutlet's shape once cold.
- Do not let the sauce boilThree yolks stirred into a cup of sauce risk curdling if it is allowed to simmer, and the recipe is explicit that it must not boil. Work off direct heat or over barely trembling water, and stop when it coats a spoon heavily.
- MushroomsThree mushrooms here probably means small buttons, perhaps 2 ounces in total. Chop them very fine and cook off their water before the sauce goes in, or the coating will be loose.
- Frying temperatureFry the crumbed cutlets in fat hot enough to colour them quickly; around 350-360F if you are measuring. The lamb should already be cooked through from the first frying, so the second is purely to colour the crust: two to three minutes, turning once.
- YieldServes three or four as a main course. Traditionally sent to table with the bones pointing up in a ring, with peas or a sharp sauce in the centre.
The name signals kitchen French rather than any particular duchess: through the nineteenth century a la duchesse was attached to dishes given a rich, refined finish, most familiarly the piped potato border still called duchesse potatoes. The technique the recipe actually uses is the one French cooks called a la Villeroi: masking a cooked item in a thick, egg-bound sauce, chilling it to a firm jacket, then breading and frying so the sauce melts inside its crust. The single-word verdict at the end, "Elegant," tells you exactly what the recipe was for. Neck of lamb was among the cheapest cuts on the block, which is rather the point: the treatment is what elevated it.