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Pepper and Salt (Trim the cutlets bread-crumb)
* Trim the cutlets, bread-crumb and fry them.
Put the haricots and onions, previously well boiled, in a stewpan with the butter; season, and stir them over the fire. When they are hot, pass them through a tammy or hair-sieve, add the white sauce, dish the cutlets, and put the purée of beans and onions in the centre, pouring round a little thin brown sauce or half-glaze.
A terse professional note rather than a domestic recipe: the quantities were assumed known to the cook, and the two sauces were standing preparations in any Victorian kitchen. Read it as an assembly instruction for lamb cutlets on a bean and onion purée.
- What the cutlets areUnqualified "cutlets" in a book of this kind most likely means lamb or mutton cutlets from the best end of neck, one rib each, the bone scraped clean, though the recipe does not say. Two or three per person is the usual allowance; veal cutlets work the same way but need longer in the pan.
- Bread-crumb means the full crumbing"Bread-crumb and fry" is shorthand for egging and crumbing: usually a dusting of flour, then beaten egg, then fine dry white crumbs, pressed on firmly. Fry in clarified butter or a neutral oil over moderate heat, roughly 3-4 minutes a side for a lamb cutlet, so the crust colours as the meat reaches medium.
- HaricotsDried white beans -- cannellini, navy or flageolet -- soaked overnight and simmered until completely soft, not the green haricots verts. Canned white beans, drained and warmed, give an acceptable purée if you are short of time.
- "Previously well boiled"Both beans and onions must be cooked to collapse before they meet the butter. Anything still firm will not go through a sieve and will leave the purée grainy.
- Tammy or hair-sieveA tammy is a stretched woollen cloth through which purées were forced with a wooden spoon; a hair-sieve is a sieve meshed with woven horsehair, often drum-shaped. A food processor followed by a pass through a fine sieve or food mill gives a comparable smooth result with far less labour.
- The two sauces"White sauce" here is a béchamel or velouté, added by the spoonful to loosen the purée -- it should mound, not run. "Half-glaze" is demi-glace: a reduced brown sauce, poured round the dish in a thin ribbon, not over the crumbs.
- Keep the crust dryThe hinge of the dish is that the sauce goes round and the purée sits in the centre well. Sauce poured over breadcrumbed cutlets softens them within a minute.
- SeasoningThe purée is the only seasoned element mentioned; salt it generously and finish with white pepper and a little lemon, since beans and onion are both flat on their own.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a modern reconstruction, a dozen cutlets with about 300 g dried beans and two large onions would serve four to six as an entrée course.
Cutlets set round a central purée are the standard Victorian entrée arrangement: the meat crowned in a ring or crescent, the garnish heaped in the middle, a thread of brown sauce round the rim of the dish. The bean and onion purée belongs to the same family as sauce Soubise, the onion purée named for an eighteenth-century French prince and, by tradition rather than documented record, traced to his household kitchen; haricots stood in for, or supported, the onion in cheaper and heartier versions. Books of "high class cookery" were written for cooks in service who already had béchamel and demi-glace standing on the stove, which is why the recipe can name both in passing and never explain them. The tammy, a woollen straining cloth wrung between two people, is the detail that dates the page most precisely, though the recipe itself allows a hair-sieve as an alternative.