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Lamb Steaks, Brown
Flatten the steaks, dip them into beaten egg, and afterwards into finely-grated bread-crumbs flavoured and seasoned as follows. With four heaped table-spoonfuls of bread-crumbs mix half a tea-spoonful of salt, a quarter of a tea-spoonful of pepper, the eighth of a small nutmeg, grated, a table-spoonful of finely-minced parsley, and the thin rind of a quarter of a lemon chopped as small as possible. Fry the chops in hot fat, thicken half a pint of nicely-seasoned gravy with a lump of butter rolled in flour, and add a glass of port and half a dozen stewed mushrooms. The latter may be omitted. Serve the steaks on a hot dish, pour the sauce into the centre, and garnish with fried sippets, or, if preferred, pickled gherkins thinly sliced. Send green peas or stewed cucumbers to table with these. Time, ten minutes to fry the steaks. Probable cost, 10d. per pound. Sufficient, half a dozen for three persons.
A straightforward egg-and-crumb fry with a port pan sauce; the only real risk is overcooking, since ten minutes was written for steaks beaten thin.
- What cut to buy"Lamb steaks" here most likely means slices cut across the leg or chump, though the recipe slips into calling them chops; no thickness is given. Either works: leg steaks, chump chops or thick loin chops, six for three people, as the recipe says.
- Flatten it properlyThe hinge of the dish. Beat the steaks to an even quarter to half inch between sheets of plastic or waxed paper so the crumb coat and the meat finish at the same moment. An unflattened chop will burn its crust before the centre is done.
- TimingTen minutes total for thin steaks in hot fat, meaning four to five minutes a side and no more. Modern practice is to pull lamb around 130-135F for medium-rare; at ten minutes a modern thick chop is nowhere near done, and a thin one is well past it.
- Half a pint of gravyAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, so 1 1/4 US cups. Use good brown stock or leftover roasting juices; a stock cube gravy will taste of salt against the port.
- A glass of portNot a modern wine glass. Read it as 2 to 3 fl oz, and let it bubble in the sauce for a minute or two to take the raw edge off it and let the sweetness settle.
- Butter rolled in flourThe ancestor of beurre manié, butter and flour worked together and whisked into the simmering gravy in small pieces; the modern version is equal parts, though "rolled in flour" suggests less flour than that. A walnut-sized lump will thicken 1 1/4 cups to about a coating consistency.
- Seasoning quantitiesAn eighth of a small nutmeg comes to somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 teaspoon grated. "The thin rind of a quarter of a lemon" means zest only, no white pith, chopped fine rather than grated so it stays visible in the crumb.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread fried in butter or dripping until crisp, arranged round the edge of the dish. The sliced gherkin alternative is the sharper choice against a sweet port sauce.
- Crumbs"Finely-grated bread-crumbs" are dry crumbs from stale bread, not fresh soft ones and not the coarse panko sort. Four heaped tablespoons is all the recipe allows for the six steaks.
Cassell's cookery dictionary is generally said to have appeared in several editions from around the 1870s onward, and its arrangement is alphabetical and encyclopaedic rather than seasonal: every cut of every animal gets its plain treatment and then two or three dressed-up variants, of which this brown-sauced version is one. The method itself, egg-and-crumb then fry then serve in a pool of sauce, is thoroughly domestic English, and the pairing of port with a nutmeg-and-lemon crumb belongs to a long Victorian and pre-Victorian habit of sweetening and spicing meat gravies that gradually fell out of fashion in the earlier twentieth century. The costing of 10d. per pound is a reminder of the book's real audience: a mistress of a modest household budgeting by the pound, who wanted to know what a dish would cost before she ordered it.