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Mutton Steaks, French
Cut steaks from the neck; make them neat by shortening the bones, which put aside with the trimmings for gravy. Put the steaks into a stewpan, and bring them to the boil, with a few small onions, savoury herbs, and water to cover; remove at once to a dish to drain, put the trimmings and bones into the liquor from which the steaks were taken, and boil for an hour. When strained, set the gravy to cool, and when the fat is cleared off, thicken it with browned butter and flour: flavour with salt, pepper, and a little vinegar. When the steaks are ready (they should be fried in the meanwhile, and dipped into egg, bread-crumbs, and finely-minced herbs), pour the gravy on a hot deep dish, and lay the steaks in it. Time to boil steaks, two minutes; to fry, five minutes. Sufficient, two pounds for four persons.
A two-stage method: the chops are blanched briefly so the crumb coating will adhere and the trimmings can make a gravy, then egg-and-crumbed and fried. Read the timings as applying to thin cutlets, not thick chops.
- The cut"Steaks from the neck" most likely means cutlets from the best end of neck — what a butcher today sells as lamb rib chops, or a rack cut into chops; the instruction to shorten the bones points that way, though the recipe does not specify. Mutton is rare in shops now and lamb is the practical substitute. Cut about 1/2 inch thick to suit the five-minute fry.
- Shortening the bonesTrimming back the rib bone is close to what is now called frenching, though the recipe asks only for shortening, not for scraping the bone bare. The scraps and bone ends are the whole basis of the gravy, so keep every one.
- The two-minute boilTwo minutes is a blanch, not cooking, and it starts the stock. The recipe gives no reason for it; the usual explanation offered is that it sets the outside. Drain the chops and pat them thoroughly dry or the coating will slide off in the pan.
- Browned butter and flourA brown roux: melt butter, stir in flour and cook it to the colour of a hazelnut before adding the strained stock. The recipe gives no proportions; equal weights is the modern default. Cooking it darker than blond is what gives this gravy its colour and flavour.
- Clearing the fatMutton fat sets hard and tastes strongly of the animal, which is why the recipe insists on cooling the liquor first. An hour in the refrigerator gives a solid cap you can lift off whole; skimming it warm leaves the sauce greasy.
- Frying timeFive minutes in hot fat, turned once. Following the blanch, a thin cutlet is likely to be cooked through rather than pink. Lamb is safe at 145F at the centre with a rest; going further makes neck meat dry rather than tender, since it is too short a cook to break down connective tissue.
- The vinegarA small quantity at the end, stirred into the finished gravy — enough to cut the fat, not enough to taste sour. The recipe specifies neither the amount nor the type.
- Yield and serviceTwo pounds of chops for four, so roughly two cutlets each. The gravy goes in the dish first and the fried cutlets rest on top, which keeps the crumb crisp; do not spoon sauce over them.
Cassell's appears to use "French" here in the sense the Victorian kitchen is generally thought to have understood it: the cutlets are trimmed to show a clean bone, coated à la panée with egg and crumbs, and served on a sauce rather than swimming in one — the treatment given to côtelettes panées in French professional practice, which English cookery writers are often said to have been absorbing since Ude and Soyer. The preliminary blanching, now largely abandoned, seems to have been common in nineteenth-century instruction for meat that was to be crumbed, on the reasoning that it set the outside and drew off the strong-tasting scum; it also conveniently produced the stock. Mutton was the everyday roasting and frying meat of British households in the Victorian period, and a dictionary of cookery of this period devotes many pages to it, working steadily down the carcass from the leg to the humbler neck, which is what these steaks come from.