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Côtelettes de Mouton à la (Pompadour Mutton Cutlets la)
Pompadour. (Mutton Cutlets à la Pompadour.) Ingredients.
Two pounds best end Neck of Mutton.
Half a pound of Liver Farce.
Eight leaves of French Gelatine.
Half a pint of Tomato Sauce.
Half a pint Béchamel Sauce.
What survives here is the ingredient list only; the method has been lost in the printing. The combination tells you exactly what kind of dish it is, though, and that is worth unpacking before you attempt anything.
- What the ingredients implyBéchamel plus leaf gelatine is the formula for sauce chaud-froid, a white sauce set firm enough to coat cold meat, and the tomato sauce would tint it pink. On that reading this is a cold entrée: cutlets cooked, cooled, trimmed, masked with pink chaud-froid and probably glazed with aspic — but with the method lost, this is an inference from the ingredient list rather than something the page states.
- Best end of neckThat is the rack — the rib section. Two pounds gives roughly six to eight cutlets once chined and trimmed; the recipe itself states no number of servings.
- Mutton versus lambMutton means sheep over two years old: stronger, leaner, firmer. Almost all supermarket meat now sold as lamb is under a year. Mutton is available from specialist butchers and takes longer, gentler cooking; lamb will taste milder than the author intended.
- Liver farceA forcemeat of liver — usually calf's or chicken liver — pounded with fat bacon, panada or breadcrumbs, egg and seasoning, then sieved. In dishes of this type it is often spread over the trimmed cutlet as a bed for the sauce, so it needs to be smooth and firm; and since it will be served cold, it must be cooked through before the cutlet is coated.
- Eight leaves of French gelatineLeaf gelatine varies by grade; modern sheets run from about 1.7 g (platinum) to over 3 g (bronze), so eight leaves could be anywhere from roughly 14 g to 25 g. That is a lot for a pint of sauce and produces a coating that sets hard on a cold surface rather than a jelly you would eat by the spoonful. Older leaf was not standardised the way today's grades are, so this quantity is genuinely ambiguous — test a spoonful on a chilled plate before committing the batch.
- Working temperatureChaud-froid coats properly only in a narrow window: stir it over ice until it thickens to the consistency of pouring cream, then coat in one pass. Too warm and it runs off; too cool and it sets in ridges. Everything being coated must be thoroughly cold and dry first.
- Half-pint measuresAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 285 ml, not the American 8 fl oz.
The name points to Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, whose name was attached to a great many nineteenth-century garnishes long after her death — the connection is decorative rather than documented, and cooks used it much as they used à la Dubarry or à la Maintenon, to lend a court pedigree to a composed dish. Some preparations carrying the name involve a pink or rose-tinted sauce, which may be what the tomato and béchamel are doing here, though the usage was never consistent. Cold chaud-froid work of this kind was a showpiece of the Victorian and Edwardian professional kitchen and of the cookery schools that trained cooks for large households: it demanded meat trimmed to identical shapes, a sauce set to an exact consistency, and a buffet table where the dish would sit under glass and be admired before it was eaten.