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Mutton Cutlets and Mushrooms
Cut the mutton in round, rather thin slices. Dust with salt and pepper, dip into beaten egg, and then in bread crumbs, again in egg and crumbs; fry in hot fat until a light brown.
Simmer a cupful of chopped mushrooms in 1/2 cup of good stock or gravy; season with salt and pepper, add 1/2 glass of melted currant jelly, and pour around the cutlets, after putting them on the hot serving dish.
A plain breaded cutlet with a quick pan sauce. The double egg-and-crumb coating is the point of the method: it seals the thin slices so they brown before the meat overcooks.
- The meat"Mutton" here means a mature sheep, stronger and firmer than the lamb sold today. Round, thin slices cut from the leg work best; boneless leg steaks about 1/2 inch thick, or lamb loin chops with the bone removed, are the closest modern equivalent. Pound them lightly to even thickness.
- Double breadingEgg, crumbs, egg again, crumbs again. Let the coated cutlets rest 10 minutes before frying so the crust sets, otherwise the second layer slides off in the pan.
- Fat and heat"Hot fat" is all the recipe says; neither the depth nor the temperature is given. Shallow-frying in a heavy skillet, with the fat hot enough to sizzle briskly but not smoking, is the safest reading: too cool and the crumbs absorb grease, too hot and they darken before the interior is done. Two to three minutes a side for a 1/2-inch cutlet.
- Half a glass of jellyA glass in books of this period usually means a wine glass, roughly 2 fluid ounces, so half a glass is about 2 tablespoons of melted currant jelly. The measure is genuinely loose; add it by taste, enough to gloss and sweeten the gravy without turning it into a dessert sauce.
- The mushroomsA cupful chopped needs only 4-5 minutes in the half cup of stock, long enough to release their liquid and take up the gravy. Longer and they collapse and the sauce goes grey.
- Stock matters"Good stock or gravy" is doing the work of the sauce here. Lamb or beef stock, or pan drippings deglazed with stock, gives body; water will leave the currant jelly tasting thin and sugary.
- Sauce placementPour the sauce around the cutlets, not over them, exactly as written. The crust is the reason for all that breading and it softens within a minute under liquid.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity or yield. As a rough guide, about 1 1/2 lb of mutton or lamb cut into eight thin cutlets would serve four; scale the mushroom sauce with the meat.
Cutlets crumbed and shallow-fried in this way were a staple of English-language household cookery in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when mutton was ordinary butcher's meat and lamb more of a seasonal item. Currant jelly in a savoury sauce follows the long-standing English habit of pairing sheep and game with a sharp-sweet fruit preserve, the same logic that puts redcurrant with venison and mint with lamb; here it is stirred straight into the gravy rather than served alongside. The loose household measures -- a cupful, half a glass -- and the assumption that good stock or gravy is already to hand are typical of manuals of this kind, which is why the sauce is described in three lines and the stock itself is never explained.