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Chicken Cutlets
These are usually made of the legs of fowls, when the white flesh has been taken for something else. Remove the thigh-bones from the legs, but leave the drumstick in its place. Put the legs into a saucepan, cover them with well-flavoured stock, and simmer them very gently till tender. If there is no stock, water must be used, and then flavouring vegetables must be thrown in, a turnip, a carrot, a bunch of parsley, a few sticks of celery, an onion stuck with cloves, and a little pepper and salt. Take the legs up, put them in press between two dishes until cold and firm, and trim them neatly to the shape of cutlets. Brush them with oil or butter, dip them in egg, and bread-crumb them twice. Fry the prepared cutlets in hot butter or lard till they are nicely browned; turn them two or three times that they may be equally cooked. Place them in a circle on a hot dish, pour bechamel round them, and, as a garnish, place dressed vegetables in the centre of the cutlets. Sufficient for a medium-sized dish. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. each chicken.
A frugal Victorian second-day dish: poached chicken legs, boned but for the drumstick, pressed flat and crumbed so they mimic a lamb cutlet. The pressing step is what makes it work.
- Press them properlyWeighting the cooked legs between two dishes until cold and firm is the hinge of the recipe. Warm or unpressed, they will not hold a cutlet shape, the coating will slide, and the meat will fall apart in the pan. Chill several hours or overnight, with a couple of tins on top.
- What "legs" means hereWhole legs, thigh plus drumstick. Bone out the thigh and leave the drumstick bone in as the handle. The recipe gives no count, only that the quantity is "sufficient for a medium-sized dish."
- Simmer temperature"Very gently" means a bare trembling simmer, not a boil; the recipe gives no time or temperature, so cook until the meat gives at the bone (roughly half an hour for small legs). A rolling boil shreds the thigh meat and you lose the shape you are trying to build.
- The court-bouillonThe cooking liquid -- If using water rather than stock, the listed vegetables (turnip, carrot, parsley, celery, and an onion studded with cloves -- an onion cloute) flavour the water. Save the strained liquid; it is useful stock for another dish.
- Breadcrumbing twiceEgg, crumbs, egg again, crumbs again. Use dry fine crumbs, not fresh, and rest the coated cutlets 20 minutes in the fridge so the crust sets before frying.
- Fat and heatShallow-fry in clarified butter or lard at about 350F. Whole butter at this heat will brown and burn before the crumb colours evenly; clarified or half butter, half neutral oil is safer.
- Reheating to the centreThe meat is already cooked, but it goes into the pan fridge-cold. Fry 3-4 minutes a side and check the thickest part reaches 165F rather than judging by crust colour alone.
- Bechamel and garnishPour the sauce around the base, not over the cutlets, or the double crumbing is wasted. "Dressed vegetables" means buttered peas, carrots or a macedoine heaped in the centre of the ring.
The cutlet shape was a Victorian and Edwardian obsession: kitchens turned salmon, veal, lobster, rice and leftover fowl into neat crumbed ovals with a bone or a paper frill standing in for the chop bone, because a cutlet read as a proper course at table in a way that scraps did not. This entry belongs to the same economy as the raised game pie and the rechauffe: the breast of a boiled or roast fowl went to a fricassee, a mayonnaise or a supreme, and the darker leg meat, which those dishes seem generally to have passed over, came back the next day dressed as something better. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a large late-nineteenth-century compilation for the middle-class household, characteristically closes with a costing: 2s. 6d. per chicken was a real figure to a housekeeper working to a weekly book, and using every part of the bird was the point of the entry as much as the recipe was.