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LAMB CUTLETS (a la Soubise)
Trim the cutlets, lard them crosswise (see LARD, To). Put one ounce of butter in a sautepan, or stewpan, and when hot put in the cutlets, and cook them over a brisk fire, turning them two or three times. Dish them up in a circle on a thin border of mashed potatoes. Pour round them a good brown sauce well reduced, and serve with Soubise sauce. (See SOUBISE SAUCE.)
A short entry that assumes you already own the two sauces it names. The cooking itself is a fast sauté; everything else is assembly.
- What a cutlet isA lamb cutlet at this period normally means a rib chop from the best end of neck, trimmed of the chine bone and scraped clean along the rib, though the recipe itself does not specify the cut. Ask for a French-trimmed rack cut into single chops, about 3-4 oz each; allow two or three per person.
- Larding crosswiseThreading thin strips of chilled pork back fat or fatty bacon through the surface of the meat with a larding needle, at right angles to the grain of the cutlet. It was insurance against dryness in very lean meat and it is optional now — modern lamb carries enough intramuscular fat that a plain sauté works. If you do lard, keep the lardons and the meat cold or the fat smears.
- Sautepan and brisk fireA wide, straight-sided pan over high heat: the point is to colour the surface fast, not to stew. One ounce of butter alone will brown and burn at that temperature, so add a spoonful of neutral oil, or clarify the butter first.
- Turning and donenessTwo or three turns over a brisk fire implies only a few minutes a side; the recipe gives no time or thickness, but about three minutes a side suits a chop an inch thick. Pull them at 130-135F for pink; lamb rib chops go grey and tighten quickly past 145F.
- Good brown sauceEspagnole or a demi-glace, reduced until it coats a spoon. A reduced veal or lamb stock thickened lightly with a beurre mani gives a similar effect without the days of simmering a classical espagnole needs.
- Soubise sauceThe book sends you to its own entry, which is not reproduced on this page. Classical soubise is onions sweated in butter until soft and colourless, cooked with rice or bound with b hamel, then pur ed and sieved. It should not brown, or the pale sweetness that defines it is lost.
- The potato borderPipe or spoon stiff mashed potato into a low ring on a warmed dish and brown it briefly under the grill so it holds. Slack mash will collapse under the brown sauce poured inside it.
- ServingBrown sauce goes around the cutlets; the Soubise is served alongside, conventionally in a sauceboat. The recipe gives no quantity of cutlets, so the number served depends on how many you cook.
Soubise is a standard nineteenth-century name for an onion pur e sauce, traditionally traced to the household of Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, an eighteenth-century French marshal whose kitchen is credited with a number of preparations — an attribution that is traditional rather than documented. Its pairing with lamb is a fixture of the classical repertoire, the pale onion sauce set against a dark reduced espagnole. Cassell's keeps the two sauces in their own alphabetical entries, so the recipe for the cutlets themselves is barely more than a note on how to sear and plate them. Borders of mashed potato used to hold a pool of sauce in place are common in cookery books of the period.