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could not obtain without the decoction of fifty hams. A cook is after all a chemist, and in those days the chemistry of the kitchen was very cumbrous and expensive. The Soubise sauce intended for mutton will be found below; but it may be doubted whether one Englishman in a million who enjoys his mutton cutlet à la Soubise dreams of what it ought to be as imagined by the great chef Bertrand, and as accepted by the Prince of Soubise. It has already been said that Bertrand was an enthusiastic believer in ham and bacon. The chief article of his worship was fumigated pig, and his notion of mutton was that it should always be intersected with bacon. Take a neck of mutton, trim it, parboil it, cut it into thick cutlets, lard them well with plugs of bacon, broil them, and serve them with a white purée of onions. Ditto for the shoulder of mutton. Englishmen are of course scandalised at the idea of larding good mutton; and accordingly they discard everything from Bertrand's receipt but the Soubise sauce. They are quite right; but at the same time it is not difficult to guess at the explanation of Bertrand's proceedings. They probably grew out of the carbonade. A carbonade of mutton is cold underdone mutton, scored and slashed and sent to the grill. Bertrand had to do a carbonade one day, and felt that the mutton already cooked would be dried up on the grill. He tried to prevent this by interlacing it with bacon; and the result of the broil was so satisfactory to him and to his master that henceforth he took to parboiling his mutton for the express purpose of larding it first and then carbonading it.
Soubise Sauce.-Peel, blanch, and mince an abundance of onions. Simmer them gently in white broth till they are done. Then add some Béchamel, or in default of Soup Béchamel a tumbler of cream with two spoonfuls of flour and two pinches of sugar. Reduce this quickly, but always taking care that it does not catch the pan and lose colour. Pass it through the tammy and finish it with fresh butter. See that it comes out decidedly thick.
Two things are being described here: Bertrand's larded, parboiled mutton cutlets, and the onion purée sauce that survived them. The sauce is the part worth making, and it hinges on colour.
- Keep the onions paleThe whole point of a Soubise is a white purée. Blanching first draws off the sharpness, and the simmering must be gentle enough that nothing browns; once the onions take colour, the sauce is a different sauce. "Does not catch the pan" means exactly that — scrape the base regularly over low heat.
- White brothAn unbrowned stock, made from veal or chicken bones and aromatics with no roasting and no colouring. A light chicken stock is the closest modern equivalent; beef or any dark stock defeats the recipe.
- A tumbler of creamA Victorian tumbler is reckoned variously at 8 to 10 fl oz (240–285 ml). The "two spoonfuls of flour" may well be tablespoons, which with that much cream gives a thick binding — the book itself insists the finished sauce come out "decidedly thick."
- Béchamel in 1877Béchamel here -- the Béchamel of this period was often a stock-and-cream sauce rather than the plain milk-and-roux version usually meant today; the recipe's reference to "Soup Béchamel" points that way. The cream-and-flour fallback given here is the practical route.
- Pass it through the tammyA tammy is a fine worsted cloth through which sauce was rubbed or wrung, sometimes with the help of wooden spoons. A food mill, then a fine sieve, does the same job; a blender gives a smoother result than the original ever had, which is no loss.
- Finish with fresh butterOff the heat, a knob at a time, swirled rather than stirred hard; over direct heat the butter is liable to separate.
- An abundance of onionsNo quantity is given. For the cream volume above, 2 lb of onions, peeled and finely sliced, produces a purée of the right density; less and you have flavoured cream rather than a Soubise.
- The cutlets themselves"Broil" here means grill over or under direct heat. Neck of mutton is hard to find; lamb neck fillet or well-trimmed lamb cutlets stand in, and being younger meat they need neither the parboiling nor the larding that Bertrand used to keep dried-out cooked mutton palatable.
- YieldThe sauce as scaled above serves six to eight alongside cutlets. It is rich and meant as an accompaniment, not a pool.
Soubise is named for Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise (1715–1787), a marshal of France better remembered at table than in the field, and the sauce is traditionally credited to his kitchen rather than to his own hand — the chef Bertrand, named here, is the figure to whom the anecdote is generally attached. Kettner's account is characteristic of the book: less a manual than a running argument about what dishes ought to be, written in the 1870s for a London readership that had absorbed French restaurant cookery and then quietly Anglicised it. The observation that Englishmen "discard everything from Bertrand's receipt but the Soubise sauce" is the real content of the entry — a note on how a garnished, larded, parboiled cutlet shrank over a century into a plain grilled chop with onion purée beside it. The larding itself belongs to an older kitchen, where mutton was often mature, lean and reheated, and strips of bacon drawn through the meat with a needle were the standard defence against dryness.