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Mutton Cutlets and Mashed Potatoes
Proceed as directed for mutton cutlets with tomato puree (see MUTTON CUTLETS WITH TOMATO PUREE), or the cutlets may broiled. Have ready boiled two pounds of mealy potatoes. Beat them to a smooth paste with two ounces of butter, a wine-glassful of milk, and pepper and salt to taste. Place them in the centre of the dish with the cutlets, meat-side downwards, round the potatoes. Time, cutlets, seven or eight minutes. Probable cost, with two pounds of mutton, 2s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain assembly dish: cutlets cooked separately, mashed potato in the middle, cutlets leaning around it. Two details need translation.
- A wine-glassfulIn Victorian cookery books this is roughly 2 fl oz, about a quarter cup. For 2 lb of potato that is a fairly dry mash by modern taste; add more warm milk if you want it looser.
- Mealy potatoesFloury varieties — Maris Piper, King Edward, russets. Waxy potatoes will turn gluey when beaten and will not hold the mounded shape the recipe depends on.
- Mutton cutletsCutlets are rib chops from the best end of neck, trimmed so the bone projects. Mutton is scarce outside specialist butchers; lamb rib chops behave the same way but are milder and cook slightly faster.
- Seven or eight minutesThe recipe gives no thickness; that timing suits a fairly thin cutlet under a fierce broiler or in a hot pan, turned once. Thicker chops need longer; go by feel or an internal temperature of about 145F for pink.
- "Meat-side downwards"The cutlets are set round the potato mound with the meaty part resting downwards on the dish and the bones pointing up and outward. It is a presentation instruction, not a cooking one.
- Butter and seasoningTwo ounces of butter to 2 lb potato is modest. Warm the milk and butter before beating them in; cold liquid makes the mash heavy.
- YieldFour to five as the book says, though 2 lb of mutton, bone included, does not stretch far across five; allow two small cutlets per person.
Cutlets set upright in a ring around a central mound is a familiar arrangement in French and English service, of a piece with the crown of cutlets. The book gives the cost, 2s., for households running to a budget; mutton was then the everyday roasting and grilling meat of Britain, cheaper and more plentiful than lamb, which was a spring luxury. The reversal since — lamb everywhere, mutton almost gone — is one of the clearer markers of how far the British meat trade shifted in the twentieth century, as sheep came to be slaughtered young rather than kept for wool and then eaten.