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Cutlet, The Invalid's
INGREDIENTS for cutlet for 1 person. -1 nice cutlet from a loin or neck of mutton, 2 teacupfuls of water, 1 very small stick of celery, pepper and salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 5d.
Have the cutlet cut from a very nice loin or neck of mutton; take off all the fat; put it into a stewpan, with the other ingredients; stew very gently indeed for nearly 2 hours, and skim off every particle of fat that may rise to the surface from time to time. The celery should be cut into thin slices before it is added to the meat, and care must be taken not to put in too much of this ingredient, or the dish will not be good. If the water is allowed to boil fast, the cutlet will be hard.
TIME. hours' very gentle stewing.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A single chop stewed almost to nothing in water and a little celery — invalid cookery, where the point was digestibility rather than flavour. It works as written, but a few of the terms need translating.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe whole method rests on the last line. Held at a bare tremble — surface barely moving, around 180F/82C — the muscle fibres relax and the meat turns spoonable. A fast boil in two hours' time will give you a hard, stringy chop and cloudy liquid.
- TeacupfulIn Beeton a teacupful is roughly a quarter of a pint, about 5 fl oz or 150 ml. Two of them come to 10 fl oz / 300 ml, which is just enough to half-cover a single chop in a small pan.
- StewpanA lidded saucepan, not a casserole dish. Use the smallest pan the cutlet will lie flat in so the liquid comes up its sides; a wide pan leaves the meat dry and reduces the water away before the time is up.
- MuttonMutton means sheep over a year old, stronger-tasting and far tougher than what butchers now sell. Ordinary lamb loin or neck chops will reach the same tenderness in appreciably less time — start checking at an hour.
- Neck cutletsNeck generally carries more connective tissue than loin and benefits from the long gentle stew; loin, being leaner and finer-grained, can dry out. Trimming off all the fat, as instructed, together with the repeated skimming, keeps the liquor clear.
- The celery warning is realOne very small stick, thinly sliced. Modern celery is generally milder than the blanched Victorian sort, but it will still dominate a broth this plain, and the recipe explicitly warns against too much.
- TimeThe printed time has dropped out of this entry; the method itself says "nearly 2 hours". Skim each time fat rises, not just at the end.
- Yield and servingOne cutlet, one person. Serve the meat with its own strained liquor as a thin gravy; the recipe gives no thickening and no accompaniment.
Invalid cookery occupied a whole department of Victorian household books, and Mrs Beeton's is no exception: beef tea, arrowroot, gruel, calf's-foot jelly, toast water, and dishes like this one, built on the belief that a sick or convalescent body could handle only unseasoned, fatless, thoroughly softened food. Mutton was one of the meats commonly given to invalids, and the near-total removal of fat and the repeated skimming reflect a period conviction that fat was what made food "heavy" and hard to digest. The average cost is given as 5d. for a single chop, a cup or two of water and a scrap of celery. Mutton has largely disappeared from British and American butchers' counters since the mid-twentieth century, which is why the recipe now reads as a period curiosity.