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The Yolk of an Egg
Pepper. Salt. A few drops of Lemon-juice.
Two ounces of chopped Marrow.
Trim the cutlets neatly, and cook them in a sauté-pan in a little stock covered over with a buttered paper. While these are cooking prepare the farce as follows: cook the butter and shalot together, then add the flour and cook well, stir in the mushrooms, parsley, yolk of egg, stock, pepper, salt and lemon-juice; let these cook without boiling, stir in the marrow and turn the farce out to cool. Mask the cutlets with this, smooth- G2 ing it over with a knife dipped in water; egg and bread-crumb, and fry in hot fat; dish up in a circle with the sauce poured over, and some nicelycooked macaroni in the centre. Sauce for the above will be found amongst the sauces: Ambassadrice Sauce.
The page as printed begins in the middle of the ingredient list, so the quantities for the cutlets, butter, shalot, flour, mushrooms and stock are missing. What survives is a clear method for lamb cutlets masked with a mushroom-and-marrow forcemeat, crumbed, fried and served with Ambassadrice sauce.
- The hinge: the farce must not boilThe book says to let the mixture cook without boiling. It is thickened by the cooked flour and enriched with a raw egg yolk, and if it is brought to a simmer the yolk curdles, the mixture breaks and it will not mask the cutlets smoothly. Keep it below a simmer, stirring, until it is thick enough to hold a line.
- Missing quantitiesOnly pepper, salt, a few drops of lemon juice and 2 oz chopped marrow are legible. A workable farce on this pattern runs about 1 oz butter, 1 chopped shalot, 1 oz flour, 4 oz chopped mushrooms, a tablespoon of parsley, one yolk and a scant half-cup of stock — but that is a reconstruction, not the book's own figures.
- "Farce"French for stuffing or forcemeat. Here it is not a stuffing but a stiff paste spread over the surface of each cutlet, a technique the period called masking.
- MarrowThe book does not specify the bone; in period cookery this generally means beef marrow, scooped from split shin or leg bones and chopped. Ask a butcher for cut marrow bones. It melts into the farce and enriches it.
- ShalotShallot. Sweat it in the butter without colour — browned shallot will spot the pale farce.
- Buttered paperA round of paper, buttered, laid directly on the cutlets in the sauté-pan so they cook in a little stock without drying. The book gives no time or heat; roughly eight to ten minutes over low heat suits trimmed cutlets. The recipe does not say what meat the cutlets are.
- Cool before crumbingThe farce must be quite cold and firm, and the cutlets cold too, or the coating slides off in the fat. Chill the masked cutlets on a tray for at least half an hour before egging and crumbing.
- Frying temperatureThe book says only "hot fat"; a modern working equivalent is about 350-375F. The cutlets have already been cooked in the sauté-pan, so the frying only sets and colours the crumb — a few minutes, drained on paper.
This is entrée cookery in the strict late-Victorian sense: a small, highly finished meat dish, sauced and named, served between the fish and the roast. Cutlets masked with a forcemeat, crumbed and fried were a staple of that course because they could be prepared in advance to the crumbing stage and finished at the last minute — exactly what a professional kitchen sending up a long menu needed. The chopped marrow marks the period as clearly as anything else on the page; it was a standard enriching fat in high-class kitchens, and is often said to have faded from English domestic cooking in the earlier twentieth century. The instruction to look up Ambassadrice sauce elsewhere in the book is typical of the genre, which assumed a reader working through a cross-referenced system of stocks and sauces rather than a single self-contained recipe.