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Chicken Cutlets
Remove fillets from two chickens; for directions, see page 245. Dip each in thick cream, roll in flour, and sauté in lard three minutes. Place in a pan, dot over with butter, and bake ten minutes. Serve with White Sauce I, to which is added one tablespoon meat extract.
A short, plain entrée that assumes you have already broken down two birds and have the book's basic sauces at hand. Two details need filling in: the oven temperature, which is never stated, and the meat extract in the sauce.
- What a fillet is hereFarmer means the boneless breast meat lifted off the breastbone, in period practice a large fillet with a small inner fillet (the tenderloin) alongside it; the directions on page 245, not reproduced here, would say how she divides them. Two chickens therefore give four large fillets, with four small ones besides. Boneless skinless breasts, halved lengthwise and lightly flattened, stand in directly.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none, and no oven term is used. For finishing pieces already coloured in the pan, a moderate modern oven of about 350-375F is a reasonable equivalent.
- The real timingThree minutes in fat plus ten in the oven suits fillets around half an inch thick. Modern breast meat is often much thicker and will dry out if the time is extended blindly; flatten the pieces to an even thickness instead and pull them at 160–165F internal.
- Cream and flourThe "thick cream" is heavy cream, used as the binder in place of egg wash. Let the floured pieces sit a few minutes before frying so the coating sets, or it will slide in the pan.
- LardLard was the everyday frying fat and gives a clean flavour and high smoke point. Clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, does the same job; use enough to film the pan well, not to deep-fry.
- White Sauce IThis is one of the book's numbered basic white sauces, made in the usual proportion of butter and flour cooked together and thinned with milk; check the book's own recipe for the exact quantities, as the numbering and proportions differ between editions.
- Meat extractThis means a concentrated commercial beef extract of the Liebig or Bovril type, sold in jars and intensely salty. A teaspoon of good beef base or a tablespoon of reduced brown stock or demi-glace gives the same dark, savoury lift; taste before adding salt to the sauce.
- ServingThe recipe says only to serve the cutlets with the sauce. Cutlets of this kind were often arranged overlapping on a hot platter with the sauce poured around rather than over, which keeps the coating from softening.
"Cutlet" here is the French côtelette borrowed loosely: not a rib chop but any small, flat, quickly cooked portion, and in late nineteenth-century American cooking the word attached itself to almost anything shaped into a neat oval and browned. The tablespoon of meat extract points to a specific commercial moment: Liebig's Extract of Meat and its competitors were among the first branded convenience products to reach American home kitchens, and cookbook writers of Farmer's generation used them freely as a shortcut to the long-simmered glaze a professional kitchen would have had standing by. Serving a white sauce darkened and deepened with extract might be read as a domestic approximation of the hotel cook's sauce suprême finished with glace de viande.