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Mutton Cutlets, Marinaded
Make a marinade of a quarter of a pint of salad oil, a table-spoonful of French vinegar, a small onion, twelve peppercorns, half a tea-spoonful of salt, and the same of mixed herbs, a dessert-spoonful of minced parsley, and the grated rind of half a lemon. Cut and trim seven or eight cutlets, lay them in the marinade, and leave them there two or three hours, then take them up and drain them. Brush each cutlet over with beaten egg, and cover it with bread-crumbs. Arrange the cutlets in a wire frying basket, plunge this into a saucepan of boiling fat, and fry to a golden brown. Drain on kitchen paper, put a frill round each bone, arrange on a hot dish, and serve at once. Probable cost, 3s.
A straightforward crumbed-and-fried chop, but two details in the original will trip up a modern cook: the imperial liquid measures and the fact that oil-marinated meat resists breadcrumbs unless it is dried properly.
- Mutton means lamb nowMutton is sheep over about two years old, with a stronger flavour and firmer texture; almost no British or American butcher sells it as a matter of course. Trimmed lamb rib chops, roughly 3 oz each, behave the same way in this recipe.
- The quarter-pintCassell's works in imperial measures, so a quarter of a pint is 5 imperial fl oz, about 140 ml or roughly three-fifths of a US cup. That is a generous amount of oil for eight cutlets, though not enough to cover them completely.
- Salad oil and French vinegarSalad oil in this period usually meant olive oil, or a mild refined oil. 'French vinegar' was generally understood to mean wine vinegar, sharper and cleaner than the malt vinegar of an English kitchen; cider vinegar is an acceptable stand-in.
- Mixed herbsVictorian dried "mixed herbs" typically included thyme, marjoram and sage, though blends varied. Half a teaspoon of dried thyme and marjoram together gets you close.
- Drain hard before crumbingThis is the hinge. Cutlets lifted straight from an oil marinade will not hold egg, and the crumb coat slides off in the fat. Pat each one thoroughly dry with paper, then egg and crumb.
- Fat temperatureThe book gives no temperature; "boiling fat" for deep frying corresponds to roughly 350-375F in modern terms. Below that the crumbs soak; above it they brown before the meat is done. A crumbed cutlet of this size takes about 4 minutes.
- DonenessLamb chops are often pulled at 130-135F internal, which is medium-rare to medium; period cooking would likely have taken them further. Fry in two batches so the fat does not drop in temperature.
- Frills and yieldThe paper cutlet frill is decorative only and entirely optional. Seven or eight cutlets serve three to four people. The "probable cost, 3s." is the household-budget note Cassell's attaches throughout, not part of the method.
The sequence marinade, egg, crumb, deep-fry is characteristic late-Victorian training in the French manner then reshaping English professional kitchens. The word marinade entered English cookery from the French, where it is generally traced to a sense of pickling in brine; by the nineteenth century it commonly meant a short flavouring bath, which is exactly its sense here. The oil-and-vinegar mixture with onion, peppercorns and lemon rind is essentially a vinaigrette, and treating cheaper or stronger-tasting mutton this way was practical as well as fashionable. The paper frill around the bone remained standard in hotel dining rooms well into the twentieth century; it is often said to have allowed guests to pick the cutlet up without greasing their fingers, though that is a traditional explanation rather than a documented one.