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Breadcrumbs and Frying Fat
Remove the meat from the bones of the neck of mutton, cut it into eight nice fillets, trim off some of the fat, and lay them in a marinade for twelve hours. The marinade in this case consists of the oil, vinegar, shalot, bayleaf, garlic, coarsely chopped parsley and salt. It is advisable to turn the fillets from time to time.
Cut the tomatoes in halves, and squeeze out a little of the pulp. Peel the button onions, fry them a golden colour in the butter; when this is done pour off the butter, add the stock, and let it come to the boil quickly. Skim well, and braise in the oven till done. By the time the onions are done, the stock should be reduced enough to glaze them with.
Put the butter left from the onions in a sautépan, place the tomatoes in it, season with pepper and salt, and fry gently for a few minutes.
Take out the fillets from the marinade, wipe dry with a cloth, egg and crumb them, and fry in hot fat to a golden brown. They must cook slowly, or they will be too brown by the time they are done. Arrange the fillets neatly in a row in the centre of an oblong dish.
Have ready the ham finely chopped and warmed in a little brown sauce just sufficient to moisten.
Put a dessertspoonful of the ham in each half of tomato, place a button onion on top of each. Pour the demi-glace sauce round the dish, and serve.
The demi-glace should be well reduced, and have a tablespoonful of the marinade mixed with it while it is reducing.
A garnished entrée in the Edwardian restaurant manner: crumbed mutton fillets, glazed button onions, tomato halves filled with ham, and a demi-glace. The ingredient quantities lived in a separate list that has not travelled with the text, so the cook has to judge them.
- The hinge: fry slowlyThe recipe says it and means it: egged and crumbed mutton wants moderate fat rather than the fierce heat you would use for chips. Hotter fat sets the crumb dark brown long before the centre of the fillet is cooked through.
- Neck of muttonTrue mutton (sheep upwards of two years, by the usual reckoning) is scarce outside halal and specialist butchers. Lamb neck fillet is the direct substitute; buy enough boned neck to yield the eight small fillets called for. Trim the fat as instructed, since the crumb coating traps whatever renders out.
- Missing quantitiesNo amounts are given for oil, vinegar, shallot or garlic. A workable marinade is about three parts oil to one part vinegar — enough to coat, not submerge — with one chopped shallot, a bruised garlic clove, a bay leaf, parsley and salt for eight small fillets.
- Twelve hours, refrigeratedThe original assumes a cold larder. Marinate covered in the refrigerator, turning two or three times, and note that the tablespoonful of marinade that goes into the demi-glace is raw-meat liquid, so it must reduce with the sauce for several minutes rather than being stirred in at the end.
- Braising the onions"Braise in the oven till done" means a moderate oven, uncovered or barely covered, roughly 25-35 minutes for peeled button onions. The stock should reduce to a syrup that coats them; if it reduces first, add a spoonful of water rather than letting the glaze catch.
- Sautépan and demi-glaceA sautépan here is a shallow, straight-sided frying pan. Demi-glace is a reduced brown sauce; a good jarred or frozen veal demi-glace, further reduced until it coats a spoon, stands in for the day-long house version.
- TomatoesUse firm medium tomatoes, halved across, seeds and some pulp squeezed out so the ham filling is not swamped. Fry cut side down gently for a few minutes only — they must hold their shape to carry a spoonful of ham and an onion.
- YieldEight fillets serve four as a main course or eight as an entrée in the older sense. Everything except the frying can be held warm, so fry the fillets last and plate at once.
Neck of mutton was among the cheapest joints in a British kitchen, and dressing it up like this is what "high class cookery" meant in the period: professional technique applied so thoroughly that the cut becomes unrecognisable. The pattern -- a marinade, egg and breadcrumbs, a garnish of glazed button onions and stuffed tomato halves, a reduced demi-glace poured round rather than over -- belongs to the French brigade tradition that shaped British hotel and club cooking in Escoffier's wake, and the tomato-and-onion garnish is close to what the period called a la portugaise. Mutton was still a staple meat of the British table then; the shift towards young lamb, which changed the flavour of dishes like this one, came later in the twentieth century.