One Egg
Breadcrumbs. Asparagus and Green Peas.
One gill of Périgord Sauce.
Two ounces of Butter.
Trim the cutlets in the usual way; sauté them in butter, and then press them between two baking sheets. Mince up some mushrooms and truffles very finely, and mix with the chicken forcemeat. When the cutlets are cold, cover one side of them with a thin layer of the forcemeat, and dip them in stiff Madère sauce; put them on ice till the sauce is quite set. Then dip them in egg and crumbs, and fry them in clarified butter.
Drain them on a cloth; dish them up in a circle, and fill up the centre with cooked asparagus points and green peas mixed. Pour Périgord sauce round them, and serve.
This is a classic côtelette en surprise: cutlets cooked, chilled, masked with forcemeat and set sauce, then crumbed and fried. The ingredient line is truncated in the original, so read it as a component list rather than a full shopping list.
- What the cutlets areThe recipe does not say what meat is meant. In late-Victorian and Edwardian cookery books "cutlets" unqualified often indicates lamb or mutton cutlets — single-rib chops, trimmed with the bone scraped clean — though veal and chicken are also used in dishes of this type. No number or weight is given in the original.
- The hinge: chill between stagesEverything depends on the cutlets and their coating being properly cold and firm before frying. Press them flat under a weighted baking sheet, chill, coat with forcemeat, coat with sauce, and chill again until the sauce is rubbery to the touch. Warm coating slides off in the pan.
- GillAbout 5 fl oz in imperial measure, a little over half a US cup. The original does not say how many cutlets it is meant to dress.
- Périgord sauceA demi-glace or espagnole finished with chopped truffle and usually a little Madeira. Named for the Périgord region of southwest France, the source of the black winter truffle. A good jarred demi-glace with truffle paste and Madeira stirred in is a reasonable substitute.
- Madère sauceMadeira sauce — the same brown base reduced with Madeira until it will coat and set on a cold surface. "Stiff" means reduced far enough that it gels when cold; if it does not set, reduce further rather than adding starch.
- Chicken forcemeatRaw breast meat pounded or processed with egg white and cream to a smooth mousseline, seasoned. Spread it thin — a thick layer will not cook through in the brief frying and the interior must reach 165F.
- Frying in clarified butterClarified butter is used because the milk solids in whole butter burn well below the temperature needed to brown crumbs. The original gives no temperature or timing; the cutlets are already sautéed, so the frying need only crisp the crumb and heat the forcemeat through.
- Yield and serviceThe original gives no quantities or number of servings. The dish is meant to be served the moment it leaves the pan, so have the asparagus tips and peas hot and the sauce at hand before frying begins.
The technique here belongs to the high French service used in English hotel and country-house cooking around 1900 — a dish built in stages, with each layer setting cold before the next is applied, so that the cutlet arrives at table crisp outside and lined with truffled mousseline. Escoffier's Guide Culinaire of 1903 codified many such cutlet preparations, and the two sauces named here, Madère and Périgord, are both derivatives of the same brown foundation, which is why one can be used to mask and the other to finish. Périgord sauce takes its name from the truffle-producing region of the Dordogne; by the time this book was written the black truffle was a standard luxury marker. The truncated ingredient line and the mismatched title "One Egg" suggest headings and component lists have drifted from their recipes at some stage of compilation or printing.