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SOUBISE SAUCE, MUTTON CUTLETS WITH (another and a better way)
Cut the mutton chops a little thicker than when you wish to broil them. Pare them nicely, and put them into a stewpan where they may all lie flat. Put the trimmings, an onion or two, a few carrots, a little salt, a bundle of parsley and green onions seasoned, four or five spoonfuls of good consomm, and sweat the whole till it is entirely done. Then take out the roots, put in a little glaze, and reduce over a large fire. When entirely boiled down to glaze, take the cutlets off the fire for a few minutes, let them settle in the glaze, take out the trimmings and green vegetables, turn over the cutlets in the glaze, and skim off the grease or fat, lay them on a cover to drain the fat, and serve up before they can get dry. This method is preferable to the other. These cutlets may be served up with all sorts of puree of vegetables.
This is a braise disguised as a chop recipe: the cutlets cook slowly in their own juices with a little stock, then finish glazed in the reduction. The soubise itself is not given here — it is the onion purée the finished cutlets are laid on.
- The hinge: sweat, don't fry"Sweat the whole till it is entirely done" means the chops lying flat in a single layer, cooking gently in the vegetable moisture and a few spoonfuls of stock, most likely under a close cover. The book gives no temperature and no timing; keep it at the barest simmer, since if the liquid boils hard the meat tightens before it tenderises.
- GlazeNineteenth-century "glaze" is glace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A tablespoon of commercial demi-glace or a heavily reduced homemade veal or lamb stock does the same job. Its purpose is the lacquered coating, not sauce volume.
- Spoonfuls of consomméSpoonfuls of consommé five sponfuls" is most likely tablespoons, which would be roughly 60-75 ml, though the book does not say. Either way it is deliberately little.
- Roots and trimmings"Roots" here are the carrots and onions, discarded once they have given up their flavour. The trimmings are the fat and bone scraps pared off the chops; they are there for gelatine and are thrown out too.
- Bundle of parsley and green onionsA bouquet garni of parsley stalks and spring onion or leek green, tied with string so it can be lifted out whole. "Seasoned" implies a little thyme and bay in the bundle.
- Lay them on a coverProbably an inverted pan lid, so surplus fat runs off before plating; a warmed plate tilted slightly does the same. Do it fast: the recipe warns to serve the cutlets before they can get dry.
- ThicknessCut the cutlets somewhat thicker than you would for grilling, perhaps three-quarters of an inch to an inch, so the long gentle cooking does not dry them. Trimmed rib chops from a rack are the modern equivalent of "pared nicely".
- YieldThe recipe gives no number; cut as many cutlets as will lie flat in the pan in one layer. Serve on a bed of soubise or any smooth vegetable purée, as the last line suggests.
Soubise is one of the classic French onion preparations — onions cooked to complete softness without colour and puréed, bound in older versions with rice, in later ones with béchamel. The name is generally traced to Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, a mid-eighteenth-century French marshal whose kitchen was credited with it, though as with most such attributions the link is traditional rather than documented. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the late Victorian decades when English middle-class cooking was steadily absorbing French method, gives two versions of the dish and frankly prefers this one — the braise-and-glaze treatment is straight out of the professional repertoire, where cutlets were routinely sweated in their own trimmings and finished in reduced stock rather than grilled. The closing line, that they may be served with any vegetable purée, shows the entry doing double duty as a template: master the glazed cutlet and the accompaniment becomes interchangeable.