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Brown Bread-crumbs
One teaspoonful of Parmesan (grated).
Trim your cutlets, fry them, and press them until cold; remove all outside pieces, so that each cutlet may be the same size and shape. Put the soubise sauce in a sauté-pan; add the mushrooms, shalot, onion, garlic, pepper, and salt; when they have cooked ten minutes, take out the garlic, stir in the yolks of egg, and cook well, also the parsley; this will now form a stiff paste, which must be put on the cutlet on one side only. Sprinkle over each cutlet a little browned bread-crumb, to which has been added the Parmesan cheese. Put them in the oven to get hot through, dish them up, and serve with brown sauce or demi-glaze.
A late-Victorian professional entrée: fried cutlets, chilled and trimmed to matching shapes, masked on one side with a thick onion-and-mushroom paste, crumbed and reheated. The printed ingredient list has been cut short, so read the method itself as the shopping list.
- The ingredient list is incompleteOnly the Parmesan survives at the head of the recipe; the method calls for cutlets, soubise sauce, mushrooms, shallot, onion, garlic, egg yolks, parsley, pepper, salt, browned crumbs and brown sauce. Quantities for all of these are missing, so treat it as a working method rather than a formula.
- The hinge: the paste must be stiff and cold-settingThe mixture has to hold its shape on the cutlet through crumbing and reheating. Cook the soubise and mushrooms down until no free liquid remains, then bind with the yolks over gentle heat so they thicken without scrambling — a paste that slumps will slide off in the oven.
- Soubise sauceAn onion purée, classically onions sweated in butter without colour and worked with either béchamel or cooked rice, then sieved. Here it is the body of the stuffing, so make it on the dry, thick side.
- "Press them until cold"Fry the cutlets, lay them flat between two trays with a light weight, and chill. This is what lets you trim them all to one outline; a warm cutlet trims raggedly and the paste will not sit on it.
- Shalot, and the whole garlic cloveShalot, and the garlic -- "Shalot" is shallot. The garlic appears to go in as a whole piece, since it is taken out after ten minutes -- it is there to perfume the paste, not to be eaten.
- Browned bread-crumbsNot fresh crumbs. These are raspings: dry crusts baked to a deep tan and sieved fine. Fresh white crumbs will steam rather than crisp in the short reheating and give a pale, damp finish.
- Oven and timing"To get hot through" implies a moderate oven only; the recipe gives neither temperature nor time. The cutlets are already cooked, so they need no more than long enough to heat through -- longer dries them and dulls the crumb.
- Demi-glazeDemi-glace — brown sauce reduced with stock to a glossy, lightly syrupy consistency. Pool it under or around the cutlets rather than over them, or the crumbed surface goes soft.
This belongs to the Anglo-French repertoire of professional and private-house kitchens of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The technique -- cooked cutlets chilled, trimmed to a uniform shape, masked on one side with a stiff duxelles or puree, crumbed and reheated -- underlies a whole family of dishes served as an entree, and it has the practical advantage that it can be done ahead and finished to order. Soubise, the onion puree doing the work here, is traditionally named for the Prince de Soubise, an eighteenth-century French marshal, though the attribution is a cookbook convention rather than a documented invention. The mismatch between the title, "Brown Bread-crumbs", and the orphaned teaspoonful of Parmesan suggests the entry has been truncated or mis-set.