Home › Fish › Côtelettes de Mouton Braisée
Côtelettes de Mouton Braisée
(Mutton Cutlets Braised.) Ingredients.
The best end of a Neck of Mutton.
Larding Bacon, and one ounce of Butter.
One Carrot, two Onions and a small Turnip.
The entry gives only the ingredient list — the method that would have followed in the original book is absent here, so what follows is guidance on the components and on how a braise of this type was understood at the time.
- Best end of neckThis is the rack: the rib section between the shoulder and the loin, cut down into single-bone cutlets. A butcher will know it as a rack of lamb; ask for it chined so the cutlets separate cleanly, and count two to three per person.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is sheep over about two years old — stronger in flavour, coarser in grain, and the reason the cut is braised rather than grilled. Most butchers sell only lamb; hogget, if you can find it, is the closer substitute and wants a longer, gentler braise than lamb does.
- Larding baconNot rashers but firm back fat cut into lardons and drawn through the lean meat with a larding needle. Mutton cutlets from the best end are lean enough to dry in a long braise, which is what the larding prevents. Barding — tying a thin sheet of fat over the surface — achieves much the same with less equipment.
- The vegetables are a mirepoixThe vegetables -- Carrot, onions and turnip, cut roughly, form the bed the cutlets braise on; the combination serves the purpose of a mirepoix, though the classic version uses celery rather than turnip. The list gives no method, but in a braise of this type such vegetables flavour the liquid and would normally be strained out rather than served.
- Braising heatThe recipe specifies no temperature. In modern terms a braise of this kind is done low, around 325F, covered, with the liquid coming no more than halfway up the meat. Higher heat squeezes the muscle fibres and the cutlets tighten before the connective tissue has softened.
- What the list leaves outNo stock, wine or seasoning is named, though a braise cannot be made without moisture. A little good brown stock, barely covering the vegetables, with the pan lid on and the liquid reduced to a glaze at the end for coating the cutlets, would be consistent with braises of this kind.
- YieldA best end of eight bones serves three to four as a main course; cutlets of this sort were commonly sent to table with the bones trimmed clean and the reduced braising liquid strained over.
Braised mutton cutlets are a fixture of the Anglo-French professional repertoire that dominated British high-class cookery from the late nineteenth century onward, when kitchen French was the mark of a serious table and English dishes were routinely renamed on the menu card. The technique answers a practical problem: mutton from a mature animal has flavour that lamb lacks but muscle that resists quick cooking, so the cutlets are larded to compensate for lean meat and set on a bed of root vegetables to braise slowly in a little stock. Larding with a needle was a standard skill in a staffed kitchen and has largely disappeared from domestic cooking along with mutton itself, which fell out of British favour over the twentieth century as lamb became the year-round supermarket default.