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Soubise Sauce (Take the best end of a neck)
Take the best end of a neck of mutton, saw off the upper rib bones, leaving the bones which will form the cutlets about three inches long; then saw off the spine bone and cut off each cutlet, trim neatly, scraping the meat and fat clean off about half an inch of the top of each bone. Arrange the cutlets neatly round in a sauté-pan, sprinkle over them a little pepper and salt, add an ounce of butter, and cook the cutlets a nice brown on each side. Serve with Soubise sauce in the centre and a good gravy round the cutlets.
The heading promises a sauce but the text is a method for trimming and frying mutton cutlets; the soubise itself is assumed to be made from another entry in the book. Plan on making an onion soubise separately before you start the meat.
- What soubise isA thick puree of onions sweated white in butter, bound with béchamel or with rice cooked in stock, then sieved and finished with cream. It is not a brown onion sauce, and the onions must not colour.
- The best end of neckThis is the rack of mutton or lamb, ribs 6-12 or thereabouts. Ask a butcher for a rack, French-trimmed and chined, which does in one step the sawing and scraping the recipe describes.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is sheep over about two years, deeper in flavour and firmer. Most supermarket racks are lamb, which is milder and cooks faster; if you find true mutton, expect a stronger, fattier cutlet.
- Trimming the bonesHalf an inch scraped clean is a light French trim. Save the scraped fat and trimmings for the gravy rather than discarding them.
- An ounce of butterAbout 30 g, which will brown and smoke in a hot pan. A spoonful of neutral oil with the butter keeps the milk solids from burning before the crust forms.
- DonenessThree to four minutes a side gives pink lamb cutlets; mutton wants a little longer. The book gives no time, leaving the cook to judge.
- Serving and yieldA rack yields six to eight cutlets, enough for three or four as an entrée. The dish is plated as a ring of cutlets with the pale soubise heaped in the middle and a spoonful of brown gravy poured around the outside, not over the meat.
Soubise is named for Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, an eighteenth-century French marshal whose household kitchen is traditionally credited with the onion puree that carries his name; as with béchamel and mornay, the attribution is courtly rather than documented. In the "high class cookery" manuals the sauce had settled into the professional repertoire as one of the standard white garnishes for lamb and mutton cutlets, and the pairing was fixed enough that a book could file the meat under the sauce's name. The arrangement described here sets the cutlets in a ring with the puree in the centre, an entrée brought to the table already composed on a silver dish rather than carved in front of the guests.