Home › The Principles of Cookery › Cutlets, Sauce For
Cutlets, Sauce For
Put an ounce of butter into a saucepan, place it over a slow fire, and mix very gradually with it an ounce of fine flour. Let it brown slightly, then add enough boiling water to make it as thick as cream, season with salt and cayenne, and vary the flavour by the addition of finely-chopped gherkins, mushroom or walnut pickle, fresh tomatoes, or tomato sauce, a minced shallot, and a glass of red wine, etc., etc. Time, a few minutes. Sufficient, a quarter of a pint of sauce for one pound of cutlets.
A plain brown roux thinned with water rather than stock, then flavoured to taste — the Victorian cook's default sauce for chops and cutlets. It is a template more than a fixed formula.
- Quantities in modern termsAn ounce each of butter and flour is about 2 tablespoons butter and a scant 1/4 cup flour. A quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz in British measure, so roughly 2/3 US cup of finished sauce per pound of cutlets.
- The hinge: brown the roux slowly"Let it brown slightly" over a slow fire is the character of the sauce. Rushed over high heat the flour scorches and turns bitter; stir steadily over low heat until it smells nutty and has taken only a light colour.
- Boiling water, not coldThe recipe specifies boiling water. Add it in stages, whisking smooth, and let each addition come back to a simmer before the next.
- Use stock if you have itThe recipe calls for water, but deglazing the cutlet pan and topping up with beef or veal stock gives a sauce with more body than water alone.
- Walnut and mushroom picklePeriod recipes use these names for both the pickled article and the sharp-savoury bottled liquor drawn from it. A teaspoon of mushroom ketchup or Worcestershire stands in; walnut ketchup is still made by a few British producers.
- The wineA "glass" is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though the measure was not fixed. Add it with the water and simmer a few minutes so the alcohol cooks off.
- CayenneA pinch is enough here; the sauce should not read as spicy.
- Choose one directionThe list of flavourings is alternatives, not a shopping list. Gherkin and shallot make a piquant sauce; tomato makes another thing entirely. Combining all of them muddles it.
The receipt is really an exercise in the brown roux, the foundation the book expects a cook to have at command before attempting anything more elaborate. The technique is generally traced to France, and by the late Victorian period it had settled into domestic manuals as ordinary knowledge. The list of flavourings is a snapshot of the late-Victorian store cupboard, where bottled walnut and mushroom ketchups sit alongside fresh tomatoes as a variation. That the sauce is measured against the weight of the cutlets rather than given as a fixed yield reflects the book's habit of teaching proportion rather than recipe.