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LAMB CUTLETS (a la Robert)
Mince three or four large onions very finely; put them into a stewpan with three ounces of fresh butter, and brown them lightly over a gentle fire. Shake the pan about to prevent burning. Add a table-spoonful and a half of vinegar, and boil all together for three or four minutes. Mix a table-spoonful of flour smoothly with half a pint of good, nicely-flavoured stock; add these to the vinegar, etc., and simmer gently for a quarter of an hour. Just before serving stir a dessert-spoonful of mixed mustard and a dessert-spoonful of Worcester sauce in with the rest, and keep the whole quite hot until the cutlets are ready. Trim these neatly, dip them twice, first into clarified butter and egg-crumbs, and afterwards into beaten egg and bread-crumbs, and fry them in the usual way until they are lightly browned on both sides. Dish them in a circle, with the sauce poured over them. Time, ten or fifteen minutes to fry the cutlets. Probable cost, 1s. per pound. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A classic sauce Robert served with crumbed lamb cutlets. The sauce is the substance of the recipe; the frying is straightforward once the crumbing is decoded.
- Keep the mustard off the boilThe mustard and Worcester sauce go in at the very end, off a hard simmer, and the sauce is only held hot. Boiling prepared mustard turns it bitter and flattens its heat, which is the whole point of a Robert.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint of stock is 10 fl oz, or about 1 1/4 US cups. A dessert-spoonful is roughly 2 teaspoons; the tablespoon of the period is near enough the modern one for a sauce of this kind.
- Mixed mustardThis means prepared mustard from the jar rather than dry powder — in an English kitchen of the period, mustard flour slaked with water, so use a smooth hot English mustard. Dijon works and is milder.
- The double crumbingThe instruction is oddly worded: the cutlets are coated once with clarified butter and crumbs, then again with beaten egg and crumbs. In practice, brush with melted clarified butter, crumb, then egg-wash and crumb a second time. The doubled shell is what keeps the coating on through a longer fry.
- Frying timeTen to fifteen minutes suits the thick, bone-in cutlets of the period. Modern trimmed lamb cutlets, about 3/4 inch at the eye, need 3 to 4 minutes a side in shallow fat and are best left pink inside; 15 minutes will leave them grey and dry.
- Browning the onionsThree or four large onions minced fine can take upwards of twenty minutes over a genuinely gentle heat to reach an even light brown. Rushing this gives scorched flecks and a harsh sauce, which is why the original insists on shaking the pan.
- Stock'Good, nicely-flavoured stock' would most likely have been a brown meat stock with some body. A thin commercial broth may need reducing first, or the tablespoon of flour will read as paste rather than gloss.
- YieldThree or four servings, as stated. The sauce quantity is generous.
Sauce Robert is one of the oldest named sauces in French cookery: onions, butter, vinegar and mustard, and it appears by name in Rabelais in the sixteenth century, where it is praised as necessary to roast duck and pork. Its origin is traditionally credited to a cook called Robert Vinot, though that attribution is repeated rather than documented. By the nineteenth century Carême and his successors had fixed it as one of the small sauces derived from espagnole, and it is in that codified form — a brown stock base thickened with flour, sharpened with vinegar and finished with mustard — that it reaches Cassell's, where the Worcester sauce is a distinctly British addition. Pairing it with lamb rather than the classic pork is likewise an English domestic liberty, and the note of "1s. per pound" places the dish squarely in the middle-class household the dictionary was written for.