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Bentinck Cutlets
Melt one ounce of butter, stir in one ounce of flour, and a tea-spoonful of curry powder. When quite smooth add half a pint of stock; season with pepper and salt. When the flour is entirely cooked and the sauce quite smooth, take it off the fire, stir in eight ounces of cold minced meat and four ounces of bread-crumbs; let it simmer for ten minutes. Add a table-spoonful of ketchup, and one beaten egg; mix thoroughly. Turn on a dish to get cold; form it into the shape of cutlets. Insert a small piece of macaroni for the bone. Brush over with egg and bread-crumbs. Fry a golden brown. Probable cost, 1s. 3d.
This is a Victorian rechâuffé — a way of turning yesterday's roast into something that looks like a fresh cutlet. The whole thing depends on getting the mixture stiff and thoroughly cold before you shape it.
- The hinge: chill it hardThe panada must be cold and firm or the cutlets will slump in the pan and burst. Spread it no more than an inch deep on a plate and refrigerate at least two hours, or overnight.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. With 1 oz each of butter and flour that gives a fairly loose sauce, which is correct here — the meat and crumbs do the thickening.
- "Take it off the fire... let it simmer"The two instructions contradict each other. Return the pan to a low heat once the meat and crumbs are stirred in, and cook gently, stirring, until the mass pulls away from the sides in a single lump. Ten minutes is about right.
- Add the egg off the heatThe beaten egg goes in after the pan comes off the stove, once the mixture has stopped steaming hard, or it will scramble in threads through the mixture.
- KetchupIn Victorian Britain this means mushroom or walnut ketchup, thin, dark and savoury rather than sweet. Worcestershire sauce or a spoonful of mushroom ketchup is closer than tomato ketchup, which will read as sugary.
- Cold minced meatEight ounces of cooked lamb, beef or mutton, chopped fine rather than puréed — a food processor pulsed a few times, not run. Roast leftovers are the intent; raw mince will not cook through in the brief fry.
- The macaroni boneUse a short length of dry, uncooked tube macaroni pushed into the narrow end of each cutlet. It is decoration in imitation of a chop bone, not eaten, and it softens slightly in the fryer.
- FryingThe recipe says only 'fry a golden brown' and does not specify shallow or deep frying. If deep-frying, 350-375°F for two to three minutes, until the crust is golden, works well. Everything inside is already cooked; you are only setting the coating. Egg-and-crumb twice for a sturdier shell.
- YieldMakes roughly six to eight small cutlets, enough for three or four as a light main course with a green salad or peas.
Cutlet-shaped croquettes were one of the great devices of the late-Victorian kitchen: a household that served a joint on Sunday needed respectable-looking ways to bring it back on Tuesday, and Cassell's is full of them. Giving the mixture the outline of a chop, complete with a stub of macaroni standing in for the bone, was a deliberate piece of table theatre — the dish announced itself as a cutlet while costing nothing beyond breadcrumbs and a spoonful of curry powder. The name is sometimes linked to the Bentinck family, in the way that Soubise and Dubarry attached aristocratic names to dishes of the period; no particular member of the family is documented in connection with it, and the derivation is not established. The curry powder is characteristic too, an inheritance of the Anglo-Indian pantry that was widely kept in British households and used less to make a curry than to give leftovers a lift.