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CUTLETS, LAMB (a la Dauphine)
Cut two pounds of cutlets from the best end of the neck, shape them neatly, trim off the fat and skin, and leave about an inch of bone bare. Put a quarter of a pound of butter into a stewpan. Let it get quite hot, then fry the cutlets in it for a few minutes, but do not let the butter brown. Drain them, and let the butter cool; mix with it the yolks of three eggs. Pass the cutlets through it until they are thickly covered. Strew bread-crumbs over them and fry them once more. Dish them in a circle, with a puree of green peas in the middle of the dish. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. per pound. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A straightforward crumbed lamb cutlet, made unusual by its coating: instead of raw beaten egg, the cutlets are dipped in the frying butter enriched with yolks. Temperature control at that step is the whole recipe.
- The hinge: cool the butter properlyThe butter must be lukewarm — around body temperature — before the yolks go in, or they will scramble and the coating will go granular instead of clinging. If it has set too firm to coat, warm it very gently rather than over direct heat.
- The cut"Best end of the neck" is the rib section, sold now as a rack of lamb or single rib chops. Two pounds gives roughly eight cutlets, depending on how closely they are trimmed. The recipe asks separately for neat shaping, trimming of fat and skin, and about an inch of bone scraped bare — what a modern kitchen calls frenching.
- Butter quantity and browningA quarter pound is 115 g, about half a cup, which is a shallow-fry depth in a small pan. Keeping it from browning is easier with clarified butter, since the milk solids are what colour and burn.
- Two fryings, two purposesThe first is a brief fry of a few minutes to firm the meat and flavour the butter; the second only sets and colours the crumbs, so keep it short and the heat moderate — hot enough to colour the crumbs, not hot enough to brown the butter.
- DonenessFor pink meat, pull the cutlets at 130–135F internal and keep the second fry short. The "half an hour" in the original is unexplained and most likely covers preparation as well as the two fryings, rather than thirty minutes of cooking.
- The pea pureeNo recipe is given. Frozen peas cooked briefly and blended with a little butter, a spoonful of the cooking water and salt gives the intended effect; pass it through a sieve if you want the smooth Victorian texture.
- Yield and costFour to five as written. The "1s. per pound" is a period price note and carries no instruction.
Cassell's dictionaries of cookery were compiled for the expanding middle-class household of late nineteenth-century Britain, arranged alphabetically so that a cook could look up a cut of meat and find several ways to send it to table. The suffix à la Dauphine belongs to the French garnish vocabulary that English kitchens borrowed in this period; such names generally signalled a set accompaniment rather than a method, and their application was not fixed. What the recipe itself specifies is the arrangement — cutlets dished in a circle with a puree of green peas in the middle. Ring service of this kind was common for dinner-party dishes, and the bared bone would have made the cutlets easier to arrange and, in some kitchens, to dress with paper frills.