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Prussian Cutlets
Take a pound of lean meat--beef, mutton, or veal--and two ounces of fat. Cut it into dice, and put with them a little salt and pepper, and four ounces of bread-crumbs, a dessert-spoonful of finely-minced onion, and the eighth of a nutmeg, grated. Mix the meat with the seasoning, and bind it together with egg yolk. Divide it into portions the size of an egg, press them well together, and make them up into the shape of cutlets. Stick a little piece of bone in at the narrow end, and brush the cutlets over twice with beaten egg. Sprinkle grated bread-crumbs thickly over them, and fry in hot fat over a slow fire till they are brightly browned, then brush them over with glaze. Place them in a circle round a hot dish, and put a mound of hot cooked vegetables in the centre. Send to table good brown gravy, tomato, Robert, or onion sauce in a tureen. Time to fry the cutlets, ten minutes. Probable cost, 1s. per pound. Sufficient, one or two for each person.
A Victorian way of turning cheap lean meat into something that looks like a chop. The method is sound; a few of the terms and proportions need translating.
- Dice means minceCutting small -- "Cut it into dice" asks for the meat cut small rather than minced outright, though the pressing and egg-binding that follow suggest a fine chop. Coarsely ground beef, lamb or veal, or cubed meat pulsed briefly in a food processor, will behave much the same; pieces much larger than a pea are harder to shape.
- The fat is not optionalTwo ounces of fat to a pound of lean meat is about 11 percent by weight, and it is the reason these are not dry. Beef suet, shredded, is closest to the original; ground beef at 80/20 is fattier than the recipe calls for but saves the extra step.
- Breadcrumb quantityFour ounces of crumbs to sixteen ounces of meat is a quarter by weight, high by modern taste, and makes a soft, almost quenelle-like cutlet. The recipe distinguishes the crumbs mixed in from the "grated bread-crumbs" sprinkled over, so the coating at least should be dry and fine. Cutting the interior crumbs to two ounces gives a meatier result.
- BindingOne egg yolk will just about bind a pound; two is safer if the mixture feels loose. Chill the shaped cutlets for twenty minutes before coating and they will hold together in the pan.
- GlazeVictorian meat glaze is brown stock reduced until it sets to a syrupy jelly, brushed on warm for shine. A tablespoon of reduced beef stock, or commercial demi-glace loosened with a little water, does the same job.
- Robert sauceSauce Robert is a brown sauce with onion, white wine and a strong hit of mustard, finished off the heat so the mustard does not turn bitter. It is the sharpest of the four options given and the best match for a rich fried cutlet.
- The boneA trimmed rib or cutlet bone pushed into the narrow end is presentation only, a trick for making forcemeat pass as a chop. Skip it, or use a short length of clean bone from the butcher.
- Frying and doneness"A slow fire" here means moderate rather than fierce heat: hot enough to brown the crumb but slow enough for the centre to cook through in the ten minutes given. The recipe gives no temperature. Ground meat should reach 160F internally, so check with a thermometer rather than trusting the colour of the crust.
- YieldA pound of meat plus the crumbs makes roughly six to eight egg-sized cutlets; at the recipe's own allowance of one or two each, that serves three to eight, with the vegetables piled in the centre as directed.
Cassell's is full of dishes that give an inexpensive forcemeat the outline of an expensive cut, and this is one of the plainest examples: minced meat pressed to a chop shape, given a bone handle, crumbed and glazed so that it reaches the table looking like something it is not. The "Prussian" label seems to belong to a nineteenth-century habit of attaching German and Austrian names to seasoned minced-meat preparations, the same current that gave English cooks the Hamburg steak and the Vienna steak; no specific Prussian original has been identified, and the nutmeg and onion seasoning is ordinary British forcemeat practice. The costing of one shilling a pound, and the instruction that one or two will do for each person, place it squarely among the economical entrees.