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Fowl Cutlets
Bone a fresh young fowl; separate the wings, legs, and merrythought; pick out all the meat from the inferior parts, mince it, and season with pepper, salt, and chopped lemon-peel. Put it in a mortar, and smooth to a paste, with a small quantity of gravy, procured by boiling the bones and trimmings. Make cutlets of the legs, wings, etc.; dip each cutlet into eggs, spread the forcemeat over, and bread-crumbs over all; then fry in butter a good brown. Serve with some of the gravy thickened in the dish. Time, one hour and a half to prepare. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian way of turning one chicken into a neat plated dish: the joints become the "cutlets", the scrap meat becomes a forcemeat coating, and the bones become the sauce. Nothing is wasted, but the order of work matters more than the ingredient list.
- MerrythoughtThe wishbone and the breast meat attached to it. The recipe names it alongside the wings and legs as one of the joints to be turned into cutlets.
- "A fresh young fowl"A roasting chicken rather than a stewing hen. An older boiling fowl has too much connective tissue to fry in the time given and will stay tough.
- Start the stock firstThe gravy from the bones and trimmings is needed twice, to loosen the forcemeat and to sauce the dish. Get the carcass and scraps into water with an onion and a bay leaf before you begin boning, and simmer 45 minutes to an hour.
- Mortar or processorA food processor does in 30 seconds what the mortar does in ten minutes. Pulse rather than run it, and add the gravy a spoonful at a time; a wet forcemeat will slide off the cutlets in the pan.
- The hinge: cook through, not just brownLeg and thigh joints coated in egg, forcemeat and crumbs will colour long before the meat is done. Fry to a good brown over moderate heat, then finish in a 350F oven for 10 to 15 minutes until the thickest part reaches 165F.
- Chill before crumbingNot in the original, but it makes the difference. Twenty minutes in the refrigerator after the forcemeat goes on sets it firm so the crumbs adhere and the coating holds during frying.
- Butter alone will burnAt the temperature needed to brown a thick crumb coating, plain butter darkens past pleasant. Use clarified butter, or half butter and half a neutral oil.
- Timing and yieldThe hour and a half is preparation, boning and stock included, and is realistic. Three or four servings, as stated, with a purée or buttered vegetables alongside.
"Cutlet" in nineteenth-century English cookery meant any small portion of meat trimmed to a neat shape, egged, crumbed and fried, so the word ranged well beyond the lamb chop it usually suggests now; fowl, veal, rabbit and even reheated fish were all cut into cutlets. Recipes of this type belong to the same impulse as the entree side of a Victorian household kitchen, where a single bird was expected to yield a presentable dish, a forcemeat and a gravy rather than simply a roast. The mortar and pestle assumed here was ordinary equipment in a well-equipped kitchen of the period, standing in for the sieve-and-muscle work that forcemeats, quenelles and purees all demanded before mechanical help arrived.