Invalid's Cutlet
INGREDIENTS for sufficient for 1 person.-1. nice cutlet from a loin or neck of mutton, 2 teacupfuls of water, 1 very small stick of celery, 6d. pepper and salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 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, or the dish will not be good. If the water is allowed to boil fast, the cutlet will be hard.
TIME.-2 hours very gentle stewing. had.
SEASONABLE. - Whenever celery may be
A single-portion invalid dish: one trimmed mutton chop barely simmered in water with a little celery. The whole point is the temperature, not the seasoning.
- Never let it boilThe instruction that decides the dish is the bare simmer — surface barely trembling, never a fast boil. A hard boil tightens the muscle fibres and the meat turns hard and stringy, exactly as the original warns.
- Two teacupfulsA Victorian teacup is roughly 6 fl oz, so about 1 1/2 cups of water in total. It should just cover the cutlet in a small pan; use the smallest pan that will hold it.
- MuttonMutton means an older sheep, usually reckoned at over two years (hogget covers the year-to-two-year animal), with a stronger flavour and more connective tissue than lamb. Lamb loin or neck chops work but will be tender well before the full two hours; mutton genuinely benefits from the whole time.
- Neck versus loinNeck chops are fattier and more sinewy, and give a better broth over long stewing. Loin is leaner and can dry out even in liquid, so keep the heat especially low.
- Trimming and skimmingRemoving every scrap of fat before cooking, then skimming repeatedly, was the practice for feeding the sick and it is still what gives a clear, light broth rather than a greasy one. Chilling the finished liquid and lifting the set fat is easier still if time allows.
- Celery, sparinglyOne short inner stick, thinly sliced, is enough. The recipe warns only that too much celery will spoil the dish.
- ServingServe the cutlet with its broth; dry toast or plain boiled rice alongside is a reasonable accompaniment, though the recipe specifies neither. It feeds one, as the original states.
Invalid cookery occupied whole chapters of Victorian household manuals, and Mrs Beeton's book is no exception: with hospitals scarce and convalescence long, the sickroom tray was the cook's responsibility. The governing theory was that a weakened digestion needed food stripped of fat, spice and anything described as "heating" — hence a chop with the fat cut away, cooked in nothing but water with one stick of celery, and the broth skimmed clean. Mutton was often said to be strengthening and easily borne, and mutton broth appears again and again in nineteenth-century sickroom diets. The technique, low and slow in a small quantity of liquid, is essentially a one-portion braise, and the warning that fast boiling hardens meat is sound kitchen science that survives unchanged.