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Cutlets à la Rachel
Ingredients.
Six or seven Mutton Cutlets.
Half a pound of Calf's Liver.
Quarter of a pound of fat Bacon.
A Pig's Caul.
One small Carrot.
One small Onion.
Parsley, Bayleaf, Thyme, all tied together.
Only the ingredient list survives on this page, but the components identify the dish precisely: cutlets part-cooked, masked with a liver-and-bacon forcemeat, wrapped in caul and finished in the oven or under the grill. The notes below cover what a modern cook needs to source and handle.
- The hinge: the caulThe pig's caul is what holds the forcemeat against the cutlet and bastes it as the fat renders. Soak it in warm water with a splash of vinegar until it unfolds without tearing, then pat dry; if it is dry or torn it will split in the heat and the farce will slide off.
- Sourcing caul fatSupermarkets rarely stock it. Order from a butcher who breaks down whole pigs, or look in halal and Chinese butchers, where it is a more common item. It freezes well and thaws quickly.
- Mutton cutletsThese are single-rib chops from the best end of neck, trimmed and the bone scraped clean. True mutton is now rare; six or seven lamb cutlets behave the same way but cook faster and taste milder. The page gives no yield; six or seven cutlets would suit three or four eaters.
- Calf's liver and baconTogether these suggest a gratin forcemeat: liver and bacon chopped or pounded fine with the vegetables, usually cooked briefly before being spread on the meat. Buy the liver in one piece rather than sliced, and use a fat, unsmoked streaky bacon so the mixture stays moist.
- The herb bundleParsley, bay and thyme tied together is a bouquet garni, put in to flavour the forcemeat or its cooking and lifted out before serving. It is not chopped into the mixture.
- What is missingThe method is not on this page. Anyone working from the list alone should treat it as a specification and follow a current recipe for caul-wrapped cutlets for timings and technique.
Garnishes and dishes styled à la Rachel are generally traced to Élisa Rachel Félix, the tragedienne who dominated the Paris stage in the 1840s and 50s and whose name attached itself to a good deal of restaurant cookery in the decades after her death; in later classical French practice a Rachel garnish usually involves artichoke bottoms and poached beef marrow, though the name was applied loosely. The construction here, a cutlet masked with a liver forcemeat and wrapped in caul, is comparable to the older côtelettes à la Maintenon, where the paper or caul case both protects the meat and keeps the stuffing in place. Books of this kind taught cooks in large private households the French repertoire under its French names.