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MUTTON CUTLETS (a la Minute)
The mutton for these cutlets should be cut from the middle of the leg, in the same direction as when carving for a dinner, but slice it rather thinner, and season slightly with pepper. Fry the meat quickly over a brisk fire, to make it crisp, turning it often. Let the cutlets be kept warm before the fire while the gravy is preparing. Have ready some mushrooms, chopped with a shallot, a sprig or two of parsley and thyme minced fine. Stew these in the butter for a few minutes, and season with salt and more pepper, if necessary. Thicken, skim, and serve round the cutlets. Probable cost, 1s. per pound.
A thin leg steak, seared hard and finished with a mushroom-shallot butter sauce made in the same pan. The whole thing depends on speed, so have every element of the garnish chopped before the meat meets the pan.
- The cut"Cutlet" here does not mean a rib chop. It means a slice taken across the middle of the leg, as a carver would cut it, only thinner — about 1/4 inch. Ask for leg steaks, or slice a boned leg yourself; lamb leg is the ordinary substitute for mutton.
- Why thin mattersLeg is lean and firm, and it dries out well before it tenderises. Cut thin and cooked fast in a very hot pan, it stays juicy; a thick slice given the same treatment will be tough. Two minutes or so a side is enough for 1/4-inch meat.
- "Keep warm before the fire"A 200F oven, on a warm plate, loosely covered. Rest them no longer than the sauce takes, or they will steam and go grey.
- SaltingThe meat is seasoned with pepper only; salt goes into the sauce. Whether that is deliberate or simply a quirk of the wording is not clear, and a light salting just before the meat hits the pan will not hurt the crust.
- "Stew these in the butter"The recipe never says what the meat was fried in, so "the butter" arrives unexplained; the likeliest reading is the fat left in the pan. Pour off any burnt fat, add fresh butter — roughly 2 tablespoons for four cutlets — and soften 4 oz chopped mushrooms with a shallot and the minced herbs for three or four minutes, scraping up the browned residue.
- "Thicken, skim"The original leaves the liquid unspecified. A splash of stock (about 1/2 cup) with the flour-and-butter thickening implied by "thicken" gives a sauce of the right consistency; skimming refers to lifting excess butter from the surface once it settles. Modern practice is simply to whisk cold butter into the reduced stock, which needs no skimming.
- Yield and costA pound of leg gives about four thin cutlets, serving two. "1s. per pound" is a Victorian retail price and dates the book more usefully than it prices the dish.
A la minute is restaurant French — a dish put together to order rather than stewed or roasted in advance — and its appearance in an English household dictionary shows how far professional kitchen vocabulary had spread into middle-class cooking in the Victorian period. The recipe also reflects the ordinary reality of British meat eating at the time: mutton, from sheep older and stronger-flavoured than the lamb now sold, was the everyday joint. Chopping mushrooms with shallot and herbs and sweating them in butter is the standard base the French called a duxelles, generally traced to the seventeenth-century kitchens of the Marquis d'Uxelles, and Cassell's uses it here as the whole of the sauce rather than as a stuffing.