Home › C › Cutlets, Mutton, Italian
Cutlets, Mutton, Italian
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons. - About 3 lbs. of the neck of mutton, clarified butter, the yolk of 1 egg, 4 tablespoonfuls of bread-crumbs, 1 tablespoonful of minced savoury herbs, 1 tablespoonful of minced parsley, 1 teaspoonful of minced shalot, 1 saltspoonful of finely-chopped lemon-peel; pepper, salt, and pounded CUTLETS, MUTTON. mace to taste; flour, 1/2 pint of hot broth or water, 2 teaspoonfuls of Harvey's sauce, 1 teaspoonful of soy, 2 teaspoonfuls of tarragon vinegar, 1 tablespoonful of port wine. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 6d.
Cut the mutton into nicely-shaped cutlets, flatten them, and trim off some of the fat, dip them in clarified butter, and then into the beaten yolk of an egg. Mix well together bread-crumbs, herbs, parsley, shalot, lemon-peel, and seasoning in the above proportion, and cover the cutlets with these ingredients. Melt some butter in a frying-pan, lay in the cutlets, and fry them a nice brown; take them out, and keep them hot before the fire. Dredge some flour into the pan, and, if there is not sufficient butter, add a little more; stir till it looks brown, then put in the hot broth or water, and the remaining ingredients; give one boil, and pour round the cutlets.
If the gravy should not be thick enough, add a little more flour. Mushrooms, when obtainable, are a great improvement to this dish, and when not in season, mushroompowder may be substituted for them. TIME.-10 minutes; rather longer should the cutlets be very thick.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Cutlets of Cold Mutton. (Cold Meat Cookery.) - INGREDIENTS.-The remains of cold loin or neck of mutton, 1 egg, bread-crumbs, brown gravy or tomato sauce.
AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the meat, 3d. mutton into cutlets, trim them, and take away a portion of the fat, should there be too too much; dip them in beaten egg, and sprinkle with bread-crumbs, and fry them a nice brown in hot dripping. Arrange them on a dish, and pour round them either a good gravy or hot tomato sauce.
Cut the remains of cold loin or neck of TIME. About 7 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
CUTLETS AND PEAS. "Dinner we have heard to be the strongest line defining The difference 'twixt man and beast, the former only dining." DAMPFNUDELN.
AMPFNUDELN, or German Puddings. -INGREDIENTS for 12 puddings.-1 lb. of flour, 1/4 lb. of butter, 5 eggs, 2 small tablespoonfuls of yeast, 2 tablespoonfuls of finelypounded sugar, milk, a very little salt. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 2d.
Put the flour into a basin, make a hole in the centre, into which put the yeast, and rather more than 1/4 pint of warm milk; make this into a batter with the middle of the flour, and let the sponge rise in a warm temperature. When sufficiently risen, mix the eggs, butter, sugar and salt, with a little more warm milk, and knead the whole well together with the hands, beating the dough until it is perfectly smooth, and it drops from the fingers. Then cover the basin with a cloth, put it in a warm place, and when the dough has nicely risen, knead it into small balls; butter the bottom of a deep sauté-pan, strew over some pounded sugar, and let the dampfnudeln be laid in, but do not let them touch one another; then pour over sufficient milk to cover them, put on the lid and let them rise to twice their original size by the side of the fire. Now place them in the oven for a few minutes to acquire a nice brown colour, and serve them on a napkin, with custard DAMSON CHEESE. sauce flavoured with vanilla, or a compôte of any fruit that may be preferred.
TIME. to hour for the sponge to rise; 10 to 15 minutes for the puddings to rise; 10 minutes to bake them in a brisk oven.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Three separate entries have been run together by the scanner: Italian mutton cutlets, cutlets of cold mutton, and Dampfnudeln. The first is the substantial one — crumbed cutlets fried and finished with a quick pan gravy — and most of the notes below concern it.
- The hinge: gravy after, not withThe cutlets come out of the pan and are held warm while the flour is browned in the fat and the liquid added. Do not try to make the sauce around the meat; the crumb coating will slump off and thicken the gravy into paste.
- Mutton and cutThree pounds of neck of mutton is the quantity given for six persons; the recipe does not say how many cutlets it yields. Lamb best end of neck (rib chops) is the nearest modern equivalent, though it is milder and cooks faster; true mutton needs a butcher's order.
- MeasuresA saltspoonful is about 1/4 teaspoon. Half an imperial pint of broth is 10 fl oz, roughly 1 1/4 US cups. "Average cost 2s. 6d." is the 1860s price for the whole dish, not a measurement.
- Harvey's sauce and soyHarvey's was a commercial bottled sauce of the anchovy-and-walnut-ketchup type, no longer generally available; Worcestershire is the closest surviving equivalent. The "soy" is soy sauce, then sold as a bottled condiment in the same shops -- use a dark, brewed one sparingly.
- Clarified butterThe cutlets are dipped in melted clarified butter before egg so the crumbs adhere and brown evenly. Ordinary melted butter works but its milk solids will scorch in the pan; ghee behaves as intended.
- TimingTen minutes is the frying time given, and the recipe itself allows rather longer for very thick cutlets.
- Mushroom powderDried mushrooms ground in a spice mill give the same effect, stirred into the gravy; the recipe specifies no quantity. Mushroom powder was a store-cupboard preparation of the period, kept for exactly this purpose before year-round cultivated mushrooms.
- Dampfnudeln oven"A brisk oven" indicates a hot oven; the book gives no temperatures. The dough is a rich enriched yeast dough; it steams in milk under a lid first and only goes into the oven to colour the tops.
- YieldThe Italian cutlets serve six as written. The cold-mutton version is a next-day dish scaled to whatever remains of the joint.
"Italian" in Victorian cookbooks rarely means anything Italian in origin; it is often taken to signal a crumbed-and-fried treatment, though in classical French usage à l'italienne points to sauce italienne, and the breadcrumbed cutlet is more usually à la milanaise. The dish sits in a long English tradition of dressing mutton with sharply flavoured bottled sauces — Harvey's, soy, tarragon vinegar, port — a habit that grew out of the eighteenth-century trade in ketchups and store sauces sold by grocers such as Lazenby, whose Harvey's was among the best known. The second entry, filed under "Cold Meat Cookery," is characteristic of Beeton's real subject: a middle-class household bought large joints and was expected to bring them back to table in a presentable second form, which is why the cost is given "exclusive of the meat." The Dampfnudeln that follows reflects the German dishes then filtering into English books, an appearance often attributed to the fashion for continental travel and to the German connections of the royal household, though the link is a surmise rather than a documented one.