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Mutton Cutlets, Reform Club
Trim four or five well-chosen thick cutlets, sprinkle them with salt and pepper, brush them with egg, and dip them into a mixture of pounded or finely-minced ham and bread-crumbs, in equal quantities. Cover them well with these, and fry in hot oil in a saute-pan for eight or ten minutes. Take care not to overdress them, and turn frequently while cooking to keep their gravy from flowing. Serve round mashed potatoes with the thick end of the cutlet downwards, and pour over them reform sauce, made in the following manner. Put together two onions, two sprigs of parsley, two of thyme, two bay-leaves, two ounces of pounded lean ham, half a clove of garlic, half a blade of mace, two spoonfuls of tarragon vinegar, one of chilli vinegar, and a pint of brown sauce. Boil up, skim well while simmering for ten minutes, and again boil to reduce to the thickness of cream, when add a table-spoonful of red currant jelly and one of finely-chopped mushrooms; stir until the jelly is quite dissolved and the flavour of mushrooms is acquired, then strain through a fine hair-sieve. This is Soyer's celebrated sauce piquant. When wanted for use make the sauce hot, and add, without boiling any more, the white of hard-boiled eggs cut into strips, four mushrooms without the brown fur and previously blanched, a gherkin or two, a pinch of cayenne, and half an ounce of cooked ham, with salt to taste. Cut all into strips of half an inch, like the eggs.
A Victorian club dish that still works, provided the cutlets are not cooked to the timing given and the sauce base is understood as a made-from-scratch espagnole.
- The hinge: the brown sauceThe recipe calls for a pint of brown sauce, which in a kitchen of this date would ordinarily mean an espagnole, and everything else is a garnish on top of it. A good demi-glace, thinned to a pint, will serve better than a thickened gravy.
- Frying timeEight to ten minutes in a saute pan will take a thick lamb cutlet well past pink. Modern practice is three to four minutes a side for a chop about an inch thick, or an internal 130-135F for medium rare, then a short rest.
- Cutlets"Mutton" here means an adult sheep, stronger and tougher than what butchers sell now. Best end of neck lamb cutlets, French-trimmed, are the usual substitute; two per person.
- The ham and crumb coatingEqual parts finely minced lean ham and dry breadcrumbs, and the ham must be chopped very fine or it will not adhere. Press the coating on firmly and chill the cutlets 20 minutes before frying so it stays put.
- Chilli vinegar and tarragon vinegarTarragon vinegar is still sold. Chilli vinegar was a common nineteenth-century condiment made by steeping dried chillies in vinegar; a spoonful of wine vinegar with a pinch of chilli flakes stands in for it.
- Mace and "half a blade"A blade of mace is one piece of the dried aril from a nutmeg; half a blade is a very small amount, roughly a pinch of ground mace. It is strained out, so the whole spice is preferable.
- "Spoonfuls"The book's unqualified "spoonful" is ambiguous between tea and table; given a pint of sauce, tablespoons are the sensible reading for the vinegars.
- The garnish goes in off the heatThe garnish goes in without further boiling -- Egg white, blanched mushroom, gherkin, ham strips and a pinch of cayenne are added to the hot strained sauce, which is not boiled again. Boiling turns the egg white rubbery and muddies the julienne, which is the whole point of the sauce's appearance.
- ServingFour or five cutlets serves two as a main course. The cutlets are stood bone-up around a dome of mashed potato, sauce poured over the meat rather than the potato.
The dish is tied to Alexis Soyer, chef of the Reform Club in Pall Mall from 1837, and the sauce here is named for the club rather than for any political virtue; the book calls it "Soyer's celebrated sauce piquant" and the attribution is the usual one in nineteenth-century English cookery books. What marks it as Soyer's kind of cooking is the layering: a long-reduced espagnole, sharpened with two flavoured vinegars and sweetened with redcurrant jelly, then finished with a cold julienne of egg white, gherkin, ham and mushroom added at the last moment for contrast in both texture and colour. Redcurrant jelly with mutton was already an English convention, so the sauce reads as a club-kitchen elaboration of a familiar pairing.