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Fresh Tomatoes
Glaze. Butter. Parsley. Remove the fillet from a loin or a neck of mutton, cut it into neat fillets crossways about half an inch thick; bat out these fillets and season them with fresh mushrooms chopped finely, and pepper and salt; place them in a buttered pan, and cook over a quick fire. Cook some chopped mushrooms in a little glaze, spread this mixture on a plate and cut out in neat squares, place one square on each fillet of mutton; dish the fillets up on a large croûton of fried bread down the middle of the dish, and lay slices of warm tomatoes down each side of the croûton with a small piece of Maître d'Hôtel butter upon each one. Serve with good suprême or good brown sauce, round.
A late-Victorian entrée in the French manner: small mutton fillets on a bread plinth, flanked by tomato slices. The printed ingredient line at the top is only a fragment — the mutton, mushrooms, tomatoes and sauce are all named in the method, so read it through before shopping.
- The cutThe fillet of a loin or neck of mutton is the eye of the loin (or the equivalent muscle running through the best end of neck). Butchers now sell this as lamb loin or backstrap; a boned rack works too. Mature mutton is available from specialist butchers, but lamb is the closer everyday substitute and needs less cooking.
- "Bat out"Pound the half-inch slices between sheets of plastic to roughly a quarter inch. This is what makes the very fast cooking possible; unbatted slices need longer and cook less evenly.
- A quick fireHigh heat, a heavy pan, and about 1 to 2 minutes a side for batted lamb. These are thin escalopes, not chops. Rest them briefly while you assemble.
- GlazeMeat glaze — glace de viande — is brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A tablespoon or two of good reduced beef or lamb stock, or a commercial glace, does the job. It is the binder that lets the mushroom mixture set stiff enough to cut into squares.
- The mushroom squaresCook the chopped mushrooms in the glaze until the mixture is thick and almost dry, spread it about a quarter inch deep on a cold plate, chill until firm, then cut squares to fit the fillets. If it will not cut cleanly, the glaze was not reduced far enough.
- Maître d'Hôtel butterSoftened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, rolled in paper and chilled, then sliced into coins. Two ounces of butter to a good tablespoon of parsley is the usual proportion.
- The croûtonNot a crouton in the salad sense: a single slab of crustless bread, cut to a long oblong, fried in clarified butter until golden on both sides and drained. Better to cut it to the length of the serving dish before frying, as fried bread is brittle and tends to crumble if trimmed afterwards.
- The sauceSuprême is a chicken velouté finished with cream and lemon; brown sauce here means a proper espagnole or reduced jus. Either is poured around the base of the dish, never over the fillets — the glazed squares and the butter are meant to stay visible.
- YieldA loin fillet yields roughly six to eight batted medallions, which serves three or four as an entrée in the old sense — a course between fish and roast — or two as a main plate.
This belongs to the Anglo-French repertoire that dominated British professional cooking in the later nineteenth century, when "high class cookery" meant a French grammar applied in country houses and hotel kitchens: a protein cut small and cooked fast, set on fried bread, garnished with a compound butter, sauced round rather than over. Mutton was still the default sheep meat in Britain at this date — older, stronger, and cheaper than lamb — and using the loin fillet was a way of getting a tender, quick-cooking cut out of an animal usually destined for slow roasting or boiling. The tomatoes are the modern note. They had been eaten in Britain for some time but were regarded well into the Victorian period as a foreign vegetable requiring long cooking; by the end of the century glasshouse cultivation seems to have made them common enough that a cookery book could file a mutton entrée under "Fresh Tomatoes" and expect readers to follow. The odd section heading is itself a clue to how such books were compiled: recipes grouped by a garnish or a fashionable ingredient rather than by the meat that carries them.