Home › The Principles of Cookery › Mutton Cutlets and Puree of Potatoes
Mutton Cutlets and Puree of Potatoes
Boil or steam two pounds of mealy potatoes, mash them with a wooden spoon, or press them through a sieve, but they must be smooth. Put them into a stewpan with two or three ounces of butter, two or three table-spoonfuls of cream or broth, pepper and salt. Make them hot, and pile them in the centre of a hot dish. The cutlets may be bread-crumbed and fried, or, if preferred, broiled and served round the puree. Time, an hour to prepare. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A simple two-part dish: a butter-enriched potato purée banked in the middle of the plate with lamb or mutton cutlets set around it. The only real skill is in the potatoes.
- Mealy potatoesThis means a floury, high-starch variety — Russet, King Edward, Maris Piper — not a waxy salad potato, which will turn gluey when mashed. Steaming rather than boiling keeps them drier and gives a lighter purée.
- Never a food processorThe instruction to use a wooden spoon or a sieve is the hinge of the recipe. A blender or processor ruptures the starch granules and produces a sticky paste; a ricer or a drum sieve gives the smooth, dry texture intended.
- Butter and cream quantitiesTwo to three ounces is 55–85 g of butter to 900 g of potato, and two or three tablespoons of cream is modest by modern standards. Warm the cream or broth before adding it so the purée does not cool and stiffen.
- CutletsA mutton cutlet is a rib chop from the best end of neck, trimmed. Mutton is scarce now; lamb rib or loin chops work directly, and cook faster — mutton being older and tougher. The recipe does not say how many chops to allow; two or three a head is the usual modern reckoning.
- Cooking the cutletsBreadcrumbed and fried means egg-and-crumbed and shallow-fried in butter or clarified fat over moderate heat, about 3–4 minutes a side for a 2 cm chop. Broiled means grilled, close to the heat, and unbreaded. Rest the meat a few minutes before plating.
- ServingThe purée goes in the centre of a heated dish with the cutlets leaning around it, bones outward — an arrangement common in Victorian service. Both elements cool fast, so warm the plates.
- Time and yieldThe stated hour covers cooking and passing the potatoes as well as the cutlets; much of it is unattended. Serves three or four as written.
Passing potatoes through a sieve and enriching them with butter and cream was a French technique that English cookery books of the later nineteenth century were still teaching as a skill in its own right, distinct from ordinary mashed potato. The arrangement — a mound of something soft in the middle, cutlets standing around it — is the crown or en couronne service familiar from Victorian and Edwardian plating, and it persisted in hotel kitchens well into the twentieth century. Mutton, the meat of a sheep over a year old and usually much more, was a staple British roasting and grilling meat of the period; the later shift to young lamb is why a recipe that once needed no explanation now calls for a substitution note.