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Pepper and Salt (One dessertspoonful of Vinegar)
One dessertspoonful of Vinegar.
Two tablespoonfuls of Salad Oil.
Half a pint of Stock.
A little Glaze.
Two ounces of Butter.
Some chopped Mushrooms.
Trim the cutlets, lay them round in a sauté-pan, put in one ounce of butter, cover them with the onion cut in slices, sprinkle over them some pepper and salt, and pour over all the stock, oil, and vinegar. Stew gently for about half an hour; take out the cutlets, glaze them, strain the sauce and reduce it; dish the cutlets on a border of mashed potatoes with the chopped mushrooms in the centre, and sauce poured round.
The title is an artefact of the original typesetting: this is a braised cutlet dish whose ingredient list has been chopped mid-sentence, so the meat itself and the onion appear only in the method. Read it as lamb or mutton cutlets for four.
- What the cutlets areVictorian "cutlets" of this kind usually mean trimmed lamb or mutton rib chops, often French-trimmed so the bone is bare. Eight to twelve is a reasonable allowance for four people depending on size.
- Dessertspoonful and half a pintA dessertspoon is two teaspoons. Half an imperial pint of stock is 10 fl oz, roughly a cup and a quarter — likely enough to come partway up the cutlets rather than submerge them.
- GlazeGlaze here is glace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A spoonful melted and brushed over the cutlets gives the shine. Reduced, unsalted homemade stock or a good commercial demi-glace stands in; salted stock cubes reduce to something inedible.
- The onionThe definite article shows it was listed in the missing part of the ingredients; a medium onion in thin slices is a fair guess, laid over the cutlets so it steams into the braise rather than frying. It goes out when the sauce is strained.
- Lay them round in a sauté-panProbably arranged in a single ring rather than piled up, so they cook evenly in the shallow liquid.
- Stew gentlyA bare simmer for roughly 30 minutes over low heat. Lamb cutlets braised this way go past pink and become tender; do not treat them as grilled chops.
- The mushroomsChop and cook them separately in the remaining ounce of butter until the moisture has gone, then season. The recipe never cooks them explicitly, but raw chopped mushrooms in the centre of the dish would be unpleasant.
- Reducing the sauceAfter straining, boil hard until it coats a spoon — perhaps a third of the original volume. Skim any surface oil; whisk in a knob of cold butter at the end if it looks thin.
- The potato borderStiff mashed potato, ideally enriched with egg yolk and butter (duchesse), piped or spooned into a ring on a hot dish. It exists to hold the sauce, so make it firmer than you would serve alone.
The garbled title is a small window into how these late-Victorian "high class" manuals were produced: the tail of one ingredient list has run into the head of another, by whatever means, leaving the dish nameless and the meat unstated. The method itself is unmistakably classical — cutlets braised under sliced onion, the cooking liquor strained and reduced to a coating sauce, the meat brushed with glaze and dished on a border of potato with a garnish in the well. That arrangement belongs to service à la russe, which over the course of the century was increasingly displacing — unevenly, and led by fashionable households — the older practice of setting all the dishes on the table at once; each entrée now arrived alone and had to look composed on its platter, hence the piped border and the central heap of mushrooms. Glace de viande, the "little glaze" called for so casually, was made from the day's stock reduced down over hours and kept in a jar to lacquer cutlets, sweetbreads and tongue.