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MUTTON CUTLETS (a la Portugaise)
Cut and trim some neat cutlets from the best end of the neck, the bone to be cut short and the top scraped clean. Season with pepper and salt, and strew over them chopped parsley and shallot. Fry them slightly, adding a couple of bay-leaves and a small bit of garlic about the size of a pea. Take the cutlets out, and wrap each one in a buttered paper, covering the paper and cutlet with forcemeat. Broil them on a gridiron over a slow even fire. Make a gravy in the frying-pan, add a dessert-spoonful of vinegar, a small tea-spoonful of anchovy sauce, with salt and pepper. Pour it round the cutlets, and serve hot. Time, five minutes to fry; eight minutes to broil. Sufficient, two pounds for four or five persons.
A Victorian cutlet dish that borrows the French papillote idea and finishes on the grill. Two things need attention before you start: the order of the wrapping, and the fact that mutton is no longer the default lamb of the butcher's counter.
- The wrapping is the hingeAs written, the cutlet goes into buttered paper and the forcemeat goes outside the paper, which would simply fall off over the fire. Standard practice in the same period is the reverse: coat the fried cutlet in forcemeat, then enclose the whole thing in a well-buttered paper case, twisting or folding the edges shut. Treat the printed order as a slip.
- ForcemeatNot specified in this recipe. A workable version is fine breadcrumbs bound with butter and egg yolk, seasoned with parsley, shallot, lemon zest and mace; chopped mushroom or a little minced veal or suet were also used. It wants to be stiff enough to press onto the meat, not spreadable.
- Mutton versus lambMutton means sheep over a year old, usually well over. Best end of neck from a modern lamb gives you a rack; ask for it chined and French-trimmed and you have the scraped bones the recipe describes. Lamb cooks faster and tastes milder, so go lighter on the garlic if you want the seasoning in proportion.
- The gridironA grate over embers, giving dry radiant heat from below. An overhead broiler at moderate rather than full heat, or a covered barbecue with the coals banked to one side, reproduces it. The paper should colour and blister; it should not catch.
- TimingsFive minutes frying and eight minutes broiling suits a cutlet about three-quarters of an inch thick and leaves it pink. Thicker chops need longer, and the paper makes it impossible to judge by eye, so use a probe: 130-135F for pink, higher if the mutton is old and you want it more done.
- Anchovy sauceThe bottled Victorian condiment, essentially anchovy essence thickened and seasoned. Anchovy paste or a mashed salted anchovy stands in; a teaspoon is enough to give the gravy depth without reading as fish.
- Small measuresA dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons. Garlic "the size of a pea" is a shaving rather than a clove -- the period taste for garlic in English cookery was cautious, and you may want more.
- The gravyDeglazing the frying-pan with vinegar and a little stock or water gives a thin, sharp jus, not a thickened sauce. Strain out the bay and garlic before pouring it round the cutlets, and serve the papers opened at the table or removed in the kitchen, as you prefer.
- YieldTwo pounds of best end serves four or five as given, which works out at roughly two small cutlets each with a starch and a green vegetable alongside.
Cassell's gives a great many mutton cutlets under French-sounding tags, and "à la portugaise" is one of the loosest of them. In later classical French usage the term settled on tomato and garlic, though what it signalled in mid-Victorian English books is harder to pin down. The technique underneath is the French papillote, in which a coated cutlet is sealed in oiled or buttered paper so the forcemeat sets and the meat steams in its own juices over the fire; it is generally traced in English kitchens to the eighteenth century and survived into the twentieth as a way of getting a chop to the table without drying it. That the book treats mutton rather than lamb as the everyday joint is characteristic, and it is of a piece with recipes that lean on anchovy, vinegar and shallot to cut the richness of an older, stronger-flavoured carcass.