Home › Entrées › Chaudfroid Cotelettes
Chaudfroid Cotelettes
Ingredients.
Two Sheets of Gelatine. Half a teaspoonful of Meat Glaze. Macédoine of Vegetable. Half a tablespoonful of Mayonnaise. One and a half pounds best end neck of Mutton.
Half a pint of Brown Sauce.
Half a gill of Aspic.
One dessertspoonful of Sherry.
This entry gives only the ingredient list — the method, as was common in cookery-school books of the period, was assumed or taught elsewhere. What follows fills in the working assumptions behind those four lines.
- What a chaudfroid isCutlets are cooked, trimmed, cooled completely, then coated with a brown sauce enriched with aspic so it sets to a smooth glossy skin. The hinge is temperature: the sauce must be cooled to the point where it just coats the back of a spoon and is beginning to thicken. Too warm and it runs off; too cold and it sets in ridges.
- Best end of neckThis is the rack — the rib section between shoulder and loin. One and a half pounds yields roughly six to eight small cutlets, enough for three or four as an entrée. Ask a butcher to chine it and french the bones.
- MuttonMutton means sheep over two years old, darker and stronger than lamb and now sold mainly by specialist butchers. A rack of lamb substitutes directly, with a milder result than the book intended.
- Imperial measuresHalf an imperial pint of brown sauce is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. A gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, so half a gill is 2½ fl oz, a scant third of a US cup. A dessertspoonful is two teaspoons.
- Brown sauceIn a book of this kind this almost certainly means espagnole — a brown roux moistened with brown stock and simmered down, not the bottled condiment sold under that name in Britain today. It should be reduced enough to coat, and strained through a fine sieve or cloth before it goes near the meat.
- AspicClarified, well-seasoned savoury jelly, traditionally made from a gelatinous stock of veal bones and calf's foot. Its job here is purely structural: it sets the sauce. Powdered gelatine dissolved in strong clear stock does the same work.
- Cooking the cutletsBraise or fry the cutlets, press them flat between two plates under a weight while they cool, and trim them to an even shape. Coating is done on thoroughly chilled, dry meat; any moisture or fat on the surface makes the chaudfroid slide.
- ServingSet the coated cutlets on a chilled dish, garnish with chopped aspic, and keep refrigerated until they go to the table. Cold cooked meat under a sealed jelly coat should not sit out more than a couple of hours.
Chaud-froid — literally hot-cold — takes its name from the method rather than the dish: the sauce is made hot and eaten cold. Its invention is traditionally credited to an 18th-century French household where a dinner was interrupted and the sauced meat returned the next day set in its own jelly, a story generally repeated in cookery literature without documentation. Whatever its origin, by the late nineteenth century the technique was a fixture of the professional cold buffet, and British cookery schools of the period commonly taught the French repertoire as the mark of high-class service. Cutlets suited the treatment well: uniform in size, easy to trim to a shape, and handsome when ranged in a circle with the bones outward and chopped aspic heaped in the middle. The terseness of the entry — four ingredients and no method — suggests it was written for readers already expected to know how to make espagnole and clarify aspic, and needing only the proportions.