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PAPILLOTE SAUCE, FOR VEAL OR MUTTON CUTLETS (a la Maintenon)
Shred into a stewpan half an ounce of fat bacon, with two small onions, finely minced. Fry them gently for four minutes, then add half a pint of thick brown sauce, a little pepper and salt, a table-spoonful of chopped mushrooms, or failing these, a table-spoonful of ketchup, a table-spoonful of finely-minced parsley, and a lump of sugar. Boil the sauce for five minutes. It may be served either hot or cold. If the flavour be liked, the saucepan can be rubbed briskly with a clove of garlic before the other ingredients are put in. Time, a quarter of an hour to prepare. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A duxelles-like brown sauce meant to be spread on cutlets before they are wrapped in paper. Its success depends entirely on the brown sauce you start with, which the book assumes you already have on the stove.
- "Thick brown sauce" means espagnoleThis is a reduced meat-stock sauce thickened with brown roux, not bottled brown sauce or gravy browning. A well-reduced demi-glace, or a good beef stock thickened with a dark roux and simmered down until it coats a spoon, is the intended base.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. The finished sauce should be thick enough to sit on a cutlet without running.
- KetchupIn a book of this date the unqualified word normally means a mushroom or walnut ketchup, a thin dark salty condiment, rather than tomato ketchup. Tomato ketchup will make the sauce sweeter and sharper than the recipe intends; a splash of mushroom ketchup is nearer the mark.
- Fat baconUnsmoked fat bacon or salt pork, shredded fine, used as the cooking fat rather than as a flavour of its own. Half an ounce is about 15 g. Smoked streaky bacon works but will dominate.
- A lump of sugarVictorian loaf-sugar lumps varied in size; a rough teaspoonful is a reasonable modern equivalent. It is there to round off the sauce rather than to sweeten it.
- Fry the onions gentlyFour minutes over low heat is meant to soften the onion and render the bacon without colouring either; the roasted depth is expected to come from the brown sauce rather than from this step.
- Salt lastThe recipe adds pepper and salt with the brown sauce, but a reduced brown sauce, salt bacon and mushroom ketchup are all salty already; taste before adding more.
- Using it en papilloteThe recipe itself gives no wrapping instructions; the title implies the sauce was spread on the cutlets, which were then enclosed in paper and cooked. Served hot, it is simply a sauce for the plate.
- YieldRoughly 1¼ cups of sauce, sufficient for five or six persons as the original states.
The name points in two directions at once. En papillote — cooking in a paper case — was standard French practice for chops and cutlets long before parchment gave way to foil, and the paper's job was to trap steam and hold a coating sauce against the meat. À la Maintenon refers to Madame de Maintenon, the second wife of Louis XIV; côtelettes à la Maintenon, cutlets spread with a thick onion-and-mushroom brown sauce and wrapped in paper, are traditionally attributed to her kitchen, though the attribution is the usual retrospective flattery rather than anything documented. Cassell's, which was assembling a comprehensive middle-class reference in the late nineteenth century, includes it as one of a family of coating sauces built on the household's standing pot of brown sauce — the sort of thing a cook made from what was already reduced on the back of the range. The recipe gives a cost of a shilling and does not trouble to tell you how to make the sauce itself.