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Soubise Sauce, Mutton Cutlets With
Take a neck of mutton, and cut off the chops one by one without flattening them; cut off some of the flat bone at the extremity of the chops. Put them into a stewpan with all the parings of the onions used to make the soubise. Season the whole well with carrots, a bunch of parsley, green onions, salt, and a very small quantity of spice, etc.; throw in four or five spoonfuls of good broth to braise them. When done, drain the cutlets, and let them cool. Strain the liquor through a silk sieve. Then reduce it to a glaze. Next pare the chops nicely, and put them with the glaze. This being completed, dish them miroton way, and pour the soubise or onion sauce into the middle.
This is the meat half of a two-part dish: it assumes you are already making a soubise (onion purée sauce) elsewhere in the book, and it uses the trimmings from those onions to flavour the braise. Read it as a braise finished with its own reduced cooking liquor.
- The hinge: very little liquidFour or five spoonfuls of broth is not a mistake. Braised this way the cutlets cook largely in steam rather than boiling, so the liquor stays concentrated enough to reduce to a glaze afterwards. The recipe does not specify a lid or an oven, but a heavy pan with a close-fitting lid, or a sealed dish in a low oven, gives the same effect.
- Mutton and neckMutton is sheep generally reckoned at over one to two years old; almost all lamb sold now is under a year and cooks faster and milder. A rack or neck of lamb cut into individual cutlets will take roughly 1 to 1.5 hours at a bare simmer; true mutton neck is likely to want 2 hours or more until the meat yields at the bone.
- "Without flattening them"The recipe gives no reason, but the likely point is that the cutlets are left thick so they keep their shape and juiciness through the braise; batting them thin, as one would for frying, would not suit here.
- Onion paringsThe skins, root ends and outer layers from the soubise onions go into the braise for colour and sweetness and are discarded with the strained vegetables. If you are not making a soubise the same day, use one large onion, quartered, skin on.
- "A very small quantity of spice"In a dish of this period that would typically suggest something like a blade of mace, a scrap of nutmeg, a clove or two, or a few peppercorns, though the recipe does not say. Restraint is the point; the finished plate should taste of onion and mutton.
- Silk sieve and glazeA fine chinois or a sieve lined with damp muslin does the same job. Reducing "to a glaze" means boiling the strained liquor down until it is syrupy and coats the back of a spoon; you will be left with only a spoonful or two, which is correct.
- Trim cold, glaze warmCooling the cutlets firms them so you can pare the bone and ragged edges cleanly. Reheat them gently in the glaze, turning to coat, rather than boiling them again.
- "Miroton way"Arranged overlapping in a ring or crown around the edge of the dish, with the sauce poured into the well in the centre.
- YieldA neck yields six to eight cutlets, enough for three or four people with the sauce and a plain starch.
Soubise is traditionally credited to the kitchen of Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, a marshal of France under Louis XV, and the name has long attached itself to preparations built on a thick purée of onions, usually softened in butter with rice or béchamel to bind them. The source, which is not named on the page, splits such dishes across separate entries — one for the sauce, one for the meat — which is why this page begins in the middle of a process and tells you to save the onion parings from a recipe printed elsewhere; the phrasing ('silk sieve', 'dish them miroton way') reads as translated French-school text. The method itself is classic braising economy: a cheap, bony cut cooked slowly in almost no liquid, and that liquid then boiled down to a spoonful of glaze that does the work of a modern jus.