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Lemon-juice (Cut and trim your cutlets)
Cut and trim your cutlets neatly into round pieces; they should be all the same size; place them in a frying-pan with the ounce of butter and fry them, but do not let them brown; have ready the chopped mushrooms and shalots. Add to the cutlets. When nearly done, add the white sauce, sauté them in it for three minutes. Add the yolks of egg, and, lastly, the finely-chopped parsley and some lemon-juice, stirring well all the time, until the sauce is thick. Dish in a circle on mashed potato, and pour the sauce over and round.
This is the method half of a Victorian entrée; the quantities lived in an ingredient list that does not travel with the text, so treat the amounts as your own decision. What survives is a sound technique — pale-fried cutlets finished in a white sauce enriched with egg yolk and sharpened with lemon.
- The hinge: the yolks must not boilOnce the egg yolks go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer or it will scramble into grains. Pull the pan off direct heat, stir the yolks in (loosened with a spoonful of the hot sauce first), and return it to the gentlest heat only until it coats the spoon.
- What cutlets are meantThe recipe does not say. In a book of this date "cutlets" in a white sauce most often means veal or lamb, cut from the loin or best end and trimmed to uniform rounds. Boneless veal escalopes or lamb loin medallions, about 3/4 in thick, behave the same way.
- Frying without browningMedium-low heat and butter that foams but never colours. Browning would give a nutty flavour and specks in a sauce that is supposed to be ivory-white — the whole point of the dish is pallor.
- "Shalots"Shallots. Chop them fine and give them a minute with the mushrooms before the sauce goes in; raw shallot in a finished white sauce tastes harsh.
- The white sauceThe recipe does not say which white sauce. A veloute -- butter and flour cooked pale, let down with veal or chicken stock -- suits the dish better than a milk bechamel. Roughly 3/4 cup of sauce is enough for four cutlets; more and it becomes soup.
- Quantities to work fromFor four: 8 cutlets, 1 oz butter, 4 oz mushrooms, 2 shallots, 2 yolks, a tablespoon of parsley, and the juice of half a lemon added at the very end so its brightness survives.
- Lemon last, and off the heatAcid added to a yolk-thickened sauce over heat encourages curdling, and lemon juice loses its brightness when cooked. The original adds it as the sauce thickens; stirring it in at the last moment, off the heat, is the safer course. Taste before adding more.
- The mashed potato ringThe recipe says only to dish the cutlets in a circle on mashed potato and pour the sauce over and round. Firm, well-dried mash, spooned or piped, holds the shape; loose mash will collapse and thin the sauce.
High-Class Cookery Recipes belongs to the wave of late-Victorian instruction books associated with the cookery-school movement, which may explain why this one opens mid-stride with "Cut and trim your cutlets" and assumes the ingredient list is elsewhere. The dish itself is an English reading of the French sauce poulette: a white sauce finished with mushrooms, egg yolk, parsley and lemon juice, a liaison that thickens and enriches at once, and closely related to the sauce of a blanquette. Entrees in this period were the made dishes served between fish and roast, and colour counted for a good deal in how they were judged, which is consistent with the insistence on butter that does not brown and constant stirring.