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Cutlets à la Bretonne
Ingredients.
Best end of a neck of Mutton.
One gill of Béchamel Sauce.
Half a pint of Haricot Beans, well cooked.
Four Onions, well cooked.
One ounce of Butter.
This is a training-school formula rather than a full recipe: the book assumes you already know how to trim and cook a cutlet, and gives only the quantities for the Breton garnish. Here is what the shorthand means.
- The hinge: the beans are the dishThe cutlets are served with a haricot bean garnish, and this list suggests the cooked beans and onions be crushed or puréed together, bound with the béchamel, with the butter beaten in off the heat.
- A gillA quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, about 140 ml. One gill of béchamel is just enough to bind the garnish, not to sauce the plate.
- Best end of neckThe rib section of the mutton rack, which is what a modern butcher sells as a rack of lamb. Ask for it chined and trimmed, then cut between the bones into cutlets, one to two ribs thick.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is meat from an older sheep (variously reckoned over one, or over two, years old, with hogget in between), stronger in flavour and now sold mainly by specialist butchers. Lamb cutlets substitute directly but cook faster, roughly three to four minutes a side for a cutlet about an inch thick.
- Haricot beansDried white beans: navy, cannellini or coco blanc. The recipe qualifies the half-pint as 'well cooked', so it most likely measures cooked beans, roughly 8 to 10 oz drained; tinned beans can stand in. 'Well cooked' means soft enough to crush against the pan.
- The onionsFour onions cooked slowly in butter until wholly soft and barely coloured, then chopped fine or puréed. Browning them would colour the white garnish.
- Cooking the cutletsThe list gives no method: grill or pan-fry them. If you finish in the oven, 400F for a few minutes is plenty, and rest them before plating.
- YieldA best end gives six to eight cutlets, so this quantity of garnish serves three or four as an entrée course.
Garnitures were the vocabulary of the late-Victorian professional kitchen, and "à la bretonne" was among the most fixed of them: the name is traditionally traced to Brittany, long associated with white haricot beans, and by the end of the nineteenth century it was understood in both English and French kitchens to mean beans with onion, sometimes garlic and tomato, served with mutton or lamb. Escoffier's lists of garnishes record the same pairing. The extreme brevity of this entry is characteristic of English cookery-school books of the period, which often appear to have been intended to accompany a demonstration lesson rather than to stand alone as instructions, and which assumed the reader had already mastered béchamel, the cooking of dried pulses and the trimming of a neck of mutton as separate exercises.