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MUTTON CUTLETS (au Champignon)
Take about four pounds of neck of mutton, and divide it into cutlets. Trim these neatly, dip them in egg and then in a mixture of minced mushrooms, parsley, and bread-crumbs. Season to taste, and fry for five or six minutes in boiling fat. Serve in a border of mashed potatoes or peas.
A straightforward crumbed cutlet, but the coating is the whole dish: raw minced mushroom mixed into breadcrumbs holds water and will slide off unless handled carefully.
- "Boiling fat"This means deep or shallow fat brought to frying heat, not liquid at a boil. Aim for 350-375F; below that the crumb coat absorbs fat and sags, above it the crumbs colour before the meat is done.
- Mushrooms in the crumbMince them very fine and squeeze them dry in a cloth before mixing with the parsley and crumbs, or the moisture will loosen the coating in the pan. Some cooks sweat the mushrooms first and cool them, which gives better flavour and no leaking.
- Getting the coat to stickFlour the trimmed cutlets lightly before the egg, press the crumb mixture on firmly, and let them rest fifteen minutes in the fridge before frying.
- Neck of muttonNeck of neck -- Best end of neck, cut between the bones, gives the classic cutlet with a rib handle; scrape the bone clean an inch from the end. The recipe gives no yield, and how many cutlets four pounds produces depends on how the neck is divided.
- Mutton or lambTrue mutton (definitions vary, but generally sheep over a year old) is rarely sold outside specialist butchers. Lamb best end works and is milder, though the dish loses some of its intended depth.
- Five or six minutesCorrect for cutlets around three-quarters of an inch thick, turned once. Thicker chops need finishing in a 375F oven rather than longer in the fat, which only burns the crumbs.
- The borderA Victorian presentation: pipe or spoon stiff mashed potato around the edge of a hot dish and lean the cutlets against it, bones inward. Peas can be heaped in the centre instead.
- Seasoning"To taste" here means salt and pepper worked into the crumb mixture, not sprinkled after frying, since nothing will adhere to the finished crust.
Cutlets crumbed and fried, then stood in a ring around a mound of vegetable or potato, were a staple of English dinner-table arrangement through the second half of the nineteenth century, when dishes were judged as much on their architecture as their flavour. The au champignon tag reflects the French vocabulary that had settled permanently into English kitchen writing by Cassell's day, though the treatment here is thoroughly domestic: mushrooms are not made into a sauce but chopped into the breadcrumb coating, which may well have been a thrifty way of spreading a small quantity of an expensive ingredient across a whole dish. Neck of mutton was among the cheaper cuts, and dressing it in egg and crumbs was a common way of giving a plain joint the look of a made dish.