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Invalid's Cutlet
Get a cutlet from the loin or neck of well-fed, fat mutton, but cut away all the fat, and leave nothing but the lean, which put into a stewpan, with just enough water to cover it, and a very little salt. Stew gently, and add a small quantity of celery cut into thin shavings. Carefully skim off any fat that may appear on the top, and when it has stewed about two hours without boiling, the meat will be easy of digestion. Add pepper and salt to taste. Time to stew celery, thirty to thirty-five minutes.
An invalid-cookery dish: one lean mutton chop poached very slowly in water until it is soft enough for a weak digestion. Simple, but the whole point rests on the temperature never reaching a boil.
- Never let it boil"Stewed about two hours without boiling" is the hinge. Hold the water at a bare tremble, well below a simmer; a rolling boil in the same two hours gives you dry, stringy meat and a cloudy liquid.
- What a cutlet is hereA single chop from the neck end or off the loin, not a breaded and fried cutlet in the French sense. Trimmed of every scrap of fat as directed, one chop yields only a small portion of lean meat.
- Mutton and its substituteMutton means older sheep (generally over two years; hogget covers one to two), still sold by halal and specialist butchers but rare in supermarkets. Lamb neck or loin chops work; being younger and leaner they will likely need less than the full two hours.
- Celery timingThe note at the end means the celery only needs 30-35 minutes, so add it for the last half hour rather than at the start. "Thin shavings" are lengthways slivers off the rib, which soften into the broth.
- Water quantity"Just enough to cover" means barely covering the chop, so the amount depends on the pan. Use the narrowest pan you have; a wide one needs more water and gives you a thinner broth.
- SkimmingSkim whenever fat rises, which is fastest early on. Fat was the specific thing this recipe aimed to remove -- it is cut away first and skimmed again in the pan -- so this is not a cosmetic step in context.
- ServingOne portion. Serve the chop with its broth and celery in a shallow bowl, seasoned only at the end as directed.
Invalid cookery occupies its own chapters in Victorian and Edwardian household books: beef tea, arrowroot, gruel, chicken panada, and dishes like this one, built on the belief that fat and browning were hard on a weak stomach while long-simmered lean meat and its liquor were nourishing and "easy of digestion." Before hospital dietetics existed as a profession, feeding the sick fell to the household cook, and the instructions are correspondingly precise about what to leave out. Mutton was among the meats commonly given in the sick-room in nineteenth-century Britain, and very slow poaching does genuinely convert tough connective tissue to gelatin, which is why the dish works even if the underlying physiology was guesswork.