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Côtelettes au Fromage
Ingredients.
Two Eggs. Half gill of Water. Mustard and Cayenne. Quarter pound of grated Cheddar Cheese.
Two ounces of Butter.
Two ounces of Flour (sifted).
The page as printed gives only the ingredient list; the method that would have followed it is missing. What survives still tells you a good deal about the dish, but it cannot be cooked from this page alone.
- What is missingButter and flour in equal weight, cooked together and then with liquid, gives the very stiff binding sauce (a roux taken to panada stiffness) into which the cheese would be stirred; a mixture of this kind is spread to cool, cut or moulded into small cutlet shapes, egged, crumbed and fried. The liquid (milk, or milk and cream), the eggs and the crumbs are all absent from this list, so the method here is inference from the title and the proportions cannot be reconstructed.
- The missing liquidFor a panada firm enough to cut, 2 oz of butter and 2 oz of flour would generally take somewhere around half a pint of milk, but the original does not say and the figure should not be treated as this author's. Use a current cheese-cutlet or croquette recipe for the ratio.
- WeightsQuarter pound of cheese is 4 oz, about 115 g and roughly a cup loosely grated. Two ounces is 55 g, or four tablespoons of butter.
- The cheeseCheddar of this period ranged from dry, well-matured farmhouse cheese to wetter factory-made blocks. A block supermarket mild Cheddar carries more moisture and will slacken the mixture; choose a mature, dry Cheddar and grate it fine so it melts evenly into the hot paste.
- Cooling is the hingeIn any dish of this construction the paste must be spread thin on a wetted or buttered tray and chilled until genuinely firm before shaping. Warm paste will not hold a cutlet form and will burst its crumb coating in the fat.
- FryingDeep fat at 350–375F browns the crumb in about two minutes without the inside running. The contents are already cooked, so the frying is for colour and crispness only.
- Portion sizeSavouries were served as small mouthfuls at the end of dinner. The yield cannot be worked out from this page, since the liquid and the coating are missing, but this weight of cheese would make only a few small cutlets.
The savoury was a fixture of the late-Victorian and Edwardian British dinner, a small, hot, sharply flavoured mouthful served after the sweet and before dessert — a course with little parallel elsewhere in Europe. Cheese did much of the work in it, and cooks trained in the French manner dressed it up in French forms and French names: cheese paste baked in ramequins, spread on toast as croûtes, or, as here, stiffened with a butter-and-flour paste, cut into the shape of a little chop, crumbed and fried, so that it arrived at table looking like a miniature cutlet. The conceit of moulding a meatless or leftover mixture into cutlet form was common across turn-of-the-century cookery books.