Maintenon
The widow Scarron, afterwards Madame de Maintenon, was married to Louis XIV. in his old age, nursed him well, made him say his prayers, and fed him with mutton cutlets carefully deprived of fat, for his poor worn stomach. The old king was in a deplorable condition: he had lost his teeth; caries of the jawbone set in ; and the liquid which he tried to swallow came out at his nose.
In his younger days he had been tremendous with his knife and fork. The Duchess of Orleans tells us in her memoirs that she often saw him eat four platefuls of soup, a whole pheasant, a partridge, a plate of salad, mutton Maître d'Hôtel 66 The hashed with garlic, two considerable slices of ham, a dish of pastry, and afterwards fruit and sweetmeats.
Duchess, by the way, thought herself a very delicate feeder; and it may help to show what pigmies we are nowadays in the way of eating, if we recall what she says of her own diet: “I seldom breakfast, and then only on bread-and-butter. I take neither chocolate, nor coffee, nor tea, being unable to endure these foreign drugs. I am German in all my habits. I eat no soup but such as I can take with milk, wine, or beer. I cannot bear brothit makes me sick, and gives me the colic. When I take broth alone I vomit even to blood, and nothing can restore the tone of my stomach but ham and sausages." It is not at all surprising that princes and princesses who fed after this fashion ruined their digestion, and that Madame de Maintenon had to keep a sharp eye on the mutton cutlets destined for the interior of her royal spouse-the Grand Monarch. The cutlets of the Marquise were done up in curl-papers; and it is to be hoped that the old king liked them better for their nocturnal attire, and the thoughts they might call up in vision of the lady-the last of his loves-in her nightcap.
Cutlets à la Maintenon. The curl-papers of Madame de Maintenon having been found inconvenient for a broil, and not less so the pig's caul which has been sometimes substituted for them, Gouffé has suggested the following more simple way of preparing these cutlets :-Take a neck of mutton and cut it into cutlets, leaving two bones to each cutlet. Remove one of them, and flatten and trim the cutlets. Split them in two with a knife, without separating them at the bone. Spread some reduced Duxelles sauce inside. Refold the cutlets, and broil them for four minutes on each side. Put a layer of Duxelles on a dish; lay the cutlets on it; pour over them some Duxelles sauce; put the dish in a hot oven for four minutes, and then serve. MAÎTRE D'HÔTEL -the House Steward-ought to com- Maraschino mand the best that is in the house; and it shows his understanding of good cookery that he chooses for himself the most simple of sauces.
Maître d'Hôtel Butter. - Knead cold fresh butter on a plate with chopped parsley, pepper, salt, and lemon-juice. The parsley should be first washed and scalded. A pat of this butter is served either upon or under broiled meat or fish, and melts on the dish. When a dish is said to be à la Maître d'Hôtel, it is almost always served with this butter, and rarely with what is called Maître d'Hôtel Sauce, which is but English butter sauce with parsley (scalded and chopped) added to it.
Two workable recipes sit inside the anecdote: Gouffé's cutlets à la Maintenon and the maître d'hôtel butter that follows. Both assume a cook who already knows what Duxelles is and owns a working grill.
- Duxelles firstNothing here works without it, and Kettner assumes you have it standing by. Duxelles is mushrooms, shallot and often a little parsley chopped very fine and cooked in butter until the moisture has gone and the mixture is nearly dry. Duxelles sauce is that mixture let down with a brown sauce or demi-glace and reduced; make it thick enough to sit inside a split cutlet without running out.
- The neck of muttonA neck of mutton cut into two-bone cutlets, one bone then removed, is what a modern butcher sells as a rack. Ask for a French-trimmed rack of lamb and cut between every second rib, or simply use thick rib chops. Mutton proper is worth seeking out for this dish if you can find it — the flavour stands up to the mushroom far better than young lamb.
- Splitting the cutletThe cut runs horizontally through the meat from the outer edge in towards the bone, leaving it hinged so it opens like a book. Work with a thin sharp knife and a chop at least 3 cm thick, or there will be nothing left to hold the filling.
- "A hot oven"Read that as 425–450F (220–230C), fully preheated. The four minutes at the end is a glazing and melding step, not cooking time; the cutlets have already had eight minutes on the grill.
- Broiling timesFour minutes a side over a fierce grill will bring a thick cutlet to medium, which is right here — the meat carries on cooking in the oven. Rest it briefly before it goes under the Duxelles or the juices will thin the sauce.
- Curl-papers and caulKettner says only "curl-papers"; the technique implied is the papillote, meat wrapped in paper for the grill, though he gives no detail of how the paper was cut or buttered. Caul fat -- the lacy membrane from a pig's abdomen -- is still sold by good butchers and remains an excellent wrapper for grilled chops, whatever the objection to it here.
- Scalding the parsleyFor the maître d'hôtel butter, thirty seconds in boiling water then straight into cold water and squeezed dry. It fixes the green and takes the raw edge off. The butter should be soft but not melted; roll it in paper, chill it hard, and cut coins to lay on the hot meat.
- YieldReckon two cutlets a person. Since each cutlet is cut two bones thick, a rack of eight ribs gives four cutlets and so serves two. The maître d'hôtel butter keeps a week in the refrigerator and months in the freezer.
Cutlets à la Maintenon are named for Françoise d'Aubigné, the widow Scarron, who married Louis XIV secretly in the 1680s and is traditionally credited with the invention of cooking chops in paper — the papillote, which Kettner turns into the joke about curl-papers and nightcaps. The attribution is a kitchen legend rather than a documented fact, and the dish as given here is not hers at all but Jules Gouffé's simplification of it, from the great Livre de cuisine of 1867, which Kettner draws on repeatedly. What survives of the original idea is the principle: a cutlet enclosed with a seasoning so that nothing escapes it. The Duchess of Orléans quoted in the anecdote is Elisabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, Liselotte, whose voluminous letters are a genuine and much-mined source for the eating habits of Versailles — though Kettner quotes her for entertainment rather than accuracy.