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Salt, Pepper and Nutmeg (Trim the neck neatly cut off)
Trim the neck neatly; cut off the bone ends, and braise in the usual way; when done, set to cool. Prepare a farce as described below. Cut the meat into cutlets, trim them, season them with pepper and salt, and cover one side with a thin layer of liver farce.
Dissolve the gelatine and mix with the sauces, allowing four leaves for the tomato sauce, and four leaves for the Béchamel sauce. When sufficiently cool, coat the covered side of the cutlets alternately with white sauce and tomato sauce. After the cutlets are well masked place them on a wire tray, and keep them on the ice till quite set.
Dish them up in a circle, put a dressed salad in the centre of the dish, place a paper ruffle on each cutlet, and serve.
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This is the assembly half of a cold chaud-froid dish — braised neck cutlets, masked in two setting sauces and dished in a ring. The hinge is temperature: the sauces must be cool enough to cling but still fluid, or the coating either slides off or sets in lumps.
- What the meat is"The neck" here is most likely neck of veal or lamb, boned and braised. A boned neck fillet or a rolled shoulder of veal, braised until tender and thoroughly chilled, gives the firm block you need to cut clean cutlets from.
- Braise "in the usual way"The book assumes the standard method: brown the trimmed neck, set it on a bed of sliced onion, carrot and a bouquet, add stock to come halfway up, cover and cook in a low oven until a skewer meets no resistance — a couple of hours or so. Cool it in its own liquor, then chill overnight; warm meat will not slice.
- FarceFarce is forcemeat. A liver farce of this period is chicken or calf's liver sweated in butter, pounded with a little panada or breadcrumb and butter, seasoned, and passed through a sieve. It should be firm enough to spread in a thin, even layer and must be fully cooked, since nothing after this point sees heat.
- Leaf gelatineFour modern leaves is roughly 7-8 g, or about two level teaspoons of powdered gelatine, and should set about half a pint (250-300 ml) of sauce to a coating consistency; period leaves varied in size and strength, so judge by a set test. Soak leaves in cold water, squeeze, and dissolve in a little of the warm sauce before stirring into the rest.
- The two saucesBéchamel and tomato sauce, each gelatined separately, are the classic white and red chaud-froid pair. Reduce both until they coat a spoon before adding gelatine; a thin sauce will run off the cutlets no matter how much gelatine is in it.
- Masking temperatureCool each sauce over ice, stirring, until it thickens to the consistency of pouring cream. Ladle it over the cutlets on the wire tray in one confident pass, catch the drips in the bowl beneath, and chill until set before a second coat.
- Keep it coldThis is a cold buffet dish held on ice for a reason. Braised meat coated in gelatined dairy sauce is a poor thing to leave standing at room temperature; assemble it cold, refrigerate until service, and serve within a few hours.
- Ruffles and yieldThe paper ruffle, or papillote, slips over the exposed bone end; cut and rolled parchment frills are still sold for crown roasts. The recipe gives no quantities; a neck will yield however many cutlets it will trim into, served in a ring with the salad in the centre.
Chaud-froid — literally "hot-cold" — is the technique of cooking a joint hot, then serving it cold under a gelatine-set sauce; it is recorded from the eighteenth century and only became a restaurant staple later, dominating the cold buffet from Carême's generation through Escoffier's. Its purpose was as much visual as gastronomic: the smooth opaque coating gave a surface that could be decorated with truffle, tongue or blanched leek, and alternating white Béchamel with red tomato across a ring of cutlets produced the banded effect that late-Victorian and Edwardian dining rooms admired. Books of "high class cookery" like this one are generally thought to have been written for cooks in large private households who were expected to reproduce hotel presentation with a coal range and an ice chest, which would explain the repeated instruction to keep the tray on ice — before mechanical refrigeration, setting a chaud-froid depended on ice that was cut in winter and stored in an ice house or else bought in, and by the late nineteenth century manufactured ice was also available. The paper ruffle and the ring around a dressed salad are the same grammar of service that gave us the cutlet frill on a crown roast.