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Strips of Tongue, Gherkin, and the White of Egg
to garnish.
Braise and press the mutton. When cold trim into cutlets. Cover one side of each cutlet with quenelle meat, and then dip in chopped tongue and truffles. Put the cutlets in a stewpan, pour in the sauce, cover with a buttered paper, and cook slowly about fifteen minutes. Serve on a border of mashed potatoes, the sauce round, and the garnish in the centre.
This page is the tail end of a longer entrée — the title names only the julienne garnish, and the sauce is assumed from the preceding recipe. What survives is a complete working method for pressed braised mutton cutlets, provided you supply the sauce yourself.
- The hinge: press the meat coldThe recipe does not name a cut. Whatever joint is braised must be pressed under a weighted board or tray while cooling, ideally overnight in the refrigerator, so it sets firm enough to cut into neat cutlet shapes. Trim it warm or unpressed and it will crumble.
- Quenelle meatA raw forcemeat, not a poached dumpling: pounded lean veal or chicken, variously bound with panada, egg or egg white and cream, seasoned, and used here as a thin coating. It sets during the fifteen minutes of gentle cooking, which is the whole point of that short time — the mutton is already cooked.
- Fifteen minutes means barely a simmerThe stewpan should stay just below a simmer. A boil will curdle the forcemeat off the cutlet and cloud the sauce.
- Buttered paperA cartouche — a disc of parchment, buttered side down, laid directly on the food. It keeps the surface from drying and stops a skin forming on the sauce.
- The sauceNone is specified on this page. A well-reduced brown braising liquor or demi-glace, strained and lightly thickened, suits pressed mutton; use roughly enough to come halfway up the cutlets, not to cover them.
- The garnishTongue, gherkin and cooked egg white cut in fine even strips, piled in the centre of the potato border. Pickled ox tongue from a deli counter works; the egg white presumably reads mainly as colour against the dark sauce.
- MuttonMutton is older sheep — usually reckoned at two years or more, with hogget covering one to two years — and is rarely sold in supermarkets. Lamb shoulder braises to a similar texture but tastes markedly milder and needs less cooking.
- The potato borderStiff mashed potato piped or spooned into a ring. Made with butter and egg yolk it holds its shape; loose mash will slump under the sauce.
Entrées of this kind were how the late-Victorian professional kitchen turned yesterday's braise into today's showpiece. Meat was cooked long and slow, pressed cold into a solid slab, cut to a formal shape, masked, and reheated in sauce — a sequence that let a cook prepare almost everything a day ahead, which mattered when dinner ran to several courses served hot in sequence. The garnish gives the dish its title because, by the naming conventions of classical French practice, it was often the garniture rather than the meat that distinguished one preparation from another: a julienne of red tongue, green gherkin and white egg, which one might guess was chosen for colour against a dark sauce as much as for flavour. Books of "high-class" recipes were aimed at cooks in large private households and at the cookery-school students training to enter them, which is why the writing assumes you already know what quenelle meat is and which sauce belongs with the previous page.