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Brazil Nut Cutlets
4 ounces of bread crumbs 3 ounces skinned and grated Brazil nuts 1/2 pint white sauce 2 teaspoons mixed herbs--parsley, thyme and mace After preparing the bread crumbs and nuts, run them both through a nut mill, and then add the herbs. To make the sauce for binding, put a teaspoon of butter into a small enamel saucepan, to which add gradually half a teaspoon of flour; when this boils, add about a teacup of milk. When boiled and thickened a little, add to the nuts and bread crumbs, and also a little lemon juice if liked. Allow it to cool, and then form into ten cutlets, and fry in boiling oil. Serve with bread sauce.
A vegetarian nut cutlet of the early food-reform kind, held together by a flour-thickened sauce. The recipe's own quantities for that sauce do not add up, and getting it right is the whole job.
- The binding is the hingeA teaspoon of butter and half a teaspoon of flour will not thicken a teacup of milk into anything that holds nuts and crumbs together. Make a proper thick panada instead — equal parts butter and flour by volume, about 2 tablespoons each, cooked out and then let down with the milk — so the sauce is stiff enough to stand in a spoon.
- Half a pint versus a teacupThe ingredient list calls for 1/2 pint of white sauce (10 fl oz imperial, 8 in US measure) but the method makes only about a teacup, which in period measure is somewhere around 5 to 6 fl oz. Add the sauce gradually to the dry mixture and stop when the mass just holds a shape; too much and the cutlets will collapse in the oil.
- Mace is not a herbParsley and thyme are; mace, the outer casing of nutmeg, is a spice and dominates fast. A generous tablespoon each of chopped parsley and thyme with a pinch or two of ground mace is closer to what is meant than two teaspoons of the three combined.
- The nut millA hand-cranked nut mill grated nuts dry and fine. A food processor works, but Brazil nuts are very oily and go to paste quickly — pulse them with the breadcrumbs, as the recipe directs, and stop while the texture is still granular.
- Skinning Brazil nutsShelled Brazil nuts still carry a thin brown skin that turns bitter. Pour boiling water over them, stand a minute, drain and rub the skins off; dry them well before grinding or the mixture will be sodden.
- Chill before frying"Allow it to cool" is doing more work than it appears. Refrigerate the mixture until firm, at least an hour, before shaping — warm nut paste falls apart the moment it meets fat.
- "Boiling oil"Oil does not boil at frying temperatures; it smokes and breaks down instead, and the phrase simply means hot enough to fry briskly, 350–375F. Fry the cutlets a few minutes a side until well browned, turning once.
- Yield and servingTen small cutlets, serving four or five with vegetables. The recipe directs bread sauce, though a thin gravy or tomato sauce also suits the sweetness of the nuts.
- Brazil nuts and seleniumBrazil nuts are extraordinarily high in selenium — a few nuts cover a day's requirement. Three ounces spread over ten cutlets is fine for an occasional dish, but this is not one to eat daily in quantity.
Nut cutlets like this belong to the British and American vegetarian cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when meatless eating was argued on hygienic, economic and religious grounds as much as culinary ones. The strategy is plain from the name: the dish is shaped, fried and sauced exactly as a veal or lamb cutlet would be, so that the vegetarian household could sit down to a recognisable dinner. Brazil nuts were prized in these books for their high fat content, which stood in for the richness of meat; nut mills and nut butters were sold to the reform market.