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Cornish Cutlets
Take three-quarters of a pound of cold meat, cut it into slices, put on a dish, and sprinkle with salt, pepper, and parsley; pour over them a table-spoonful of ketchup. Wash, peel, and boil one pound of potatoes, rub them through a sieve; beat up one egg and mix with the mashed potatoes, season with pepper, salt, and a little lemon-juice or grated nutmeg. Cover well each slice with the mash, and shape and smooth with a knife. Beat up another egg, dip each slice in it, and bread-crumb well. When it is set, repeat the process. Fry in hot fat to a golden colour, drain on a cloth, and dish up garnished with parsley. Probable cost, 1s.
A Victorian way of turning Sunday's cold roast into something worth serving again: slices of meat jacketed in stiff mashed potato, breaded twice and fried. Nothing here is difficult, but the coating fails if the potato is wet or the slices go into the pan warm.
- Ketchup means something elseIn an 1890s British kitchen "ketchup" without qualification usually meant mushroom or walnut ketchup, a thin, dark, salty condiment much closer to Worcestershire sauce than to anything tomato-based, though tomato ketchup was also known by then. Mushroom ketchup or Worcestershire is the safer reading; modern tomato ketchup adds sugar and bulk the recipe does not want.
- The hinge: a dry, stiff mashThe potato has to hold its shape around a slice of meat while it is dipped, crumbed and fried. The recipe says to wash, peel and boil; boiling whole in their skins or steaming gives a drier result. Either way, dry them off in the pan over low heat after draining and sieve them while hot. A loose or buttery mash will slide off in the fat.
- Chill before frying"When it is set" is doing real work. After the first coat of egg and crumb, refrigerate the cutlets for 20-30 minutes, crumb again, and chill once more before they meet the fat. Cold, firm cutlets keep their shape and absorb less grease.
- Frying temperature"Hot fat" for this style of shallow or deep frying means 350-375F. Below that the crumb soaks; above, the outside colours before the interior is hot through. The meat is already cooked, so you are only heating it and browning the crust, three to four minutes.
- The meatAny cold roast beef, lamb, mutton or veal works, cut about a quarter-inch thick so the slices are broad enough to coat. Trim gristle and hard fat, which will not soften in the brief fry.
- Draining"Drain on a cloth" is the period equivalent of paper towel; a rack set over a tray is better still, since it keeps the underside from steaming.
- Quantities and yieldThree-quarters of a pound of meat with a pound of potatoes makes six to eight cutlets, enough for three or four as a main course with a green vegetable. The "probable cost, 1s." is a late-Victorian shilling and is a note on economy, not a measurement.
- ServingThe book stops at parsley, but these are dry and want moisture: a brown gravy, tomato sauce, or the same mushroom ketchup thinned with stock.
Recipes of this kind sit in a large Victorian category of "rechauffé" or made-over dishes, whose purpose was to present yesterday's joint in a form that did not look like leftovers at table. Cassell's, like Mrs Beeton before it, gave such dishes their own dignified names and a stated cost, since a middle-class household with a cook was expected to run on economical principles without admitting to them in the dining room. The "Cornish" label is decorative rather than geographical; there is no documented Cornish origin, and the county's association with meat-and-potato cookery, above all the pasty, was probably enough to attach the name. What makes the dish work is the same instinct behind the pasty and the croquette: potato as a wrapper, doing the job pastry does elsewhere, and doing it more cheaply.