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Mutton Cutlets à la Maintenon
Re- Wipe six French Chops, cut one and one-half inches thick. Split meat in halves, cutting to bone. Cook two and one-half tablespoons butter and one tablespoon onion five minutes; remove onion, add one-half cup chopped mushrooms, and cook five minutes; then add two tablespoons flour, three tablespoons stock, one teaspoon finely chopped parsley, one-fourth teaspoon salt, and a few grains cayenne. Spread mixture between layers of chops, press together lightly, wrap in buttered paper cases, and broil ten minutes. Serve with Spanish Sauce.
A stuffed chop cooked in a paper case, essentially a duxelles sandwiched inside the meat. The filling is the whole point, and it needs to be thick enough to stay put.
- The stray "Re-"The text opens with a fragment, most likely an artefact of the printing or transcription rather than part of the instruction. Ignore it; the instruction begins at "Wipe six French Chops."
- French chopsRib chops with the bone scraped clean of meat and fat for an inch or two. Any butcher will french a rack. The recipe calls for mutton; lamb is the usual modern substitute. Note that at an inch and a half the chops are thicker than the gap between two ribs, so a single rack will not necessarily yield six.
- Splitting the meatYou are butterflying the eye of the chop: cut horizontally through the muscle to the bone so it opens like a book. Keep the knife level and stop at the bone, or the pocket will tear through.
- The filling is a duxellesMushrooms, butter, onion for flavour only, then flour and stock to bind. Cook it until it is a stiff paste that holds its shape on the spoon. If it is loose it will run out during broiling and the chops will gape.
- StockThree tablespoons is a small amount and deliberately so. Use a well-reduced brown stock or a good commercial demi-glace; thin canned broth will not give the body the sauce contributes.
- Buttered paper casesParchment, not waxed paper, cut in a heart or oval, buttered on the inside and the edges folded over to seal. This is cooking en papillote, and it protects the filling more than the meat.
- Ten minutes will not be enoughTen minutes may not be enough -- A butterflied stuffed chop an inch and a half thick, wrapped in paper under a broiler, can easily be underdone at the centre where the filling sits. If in doubt, sear the chops in a pan before assembling, then finish the wrapped chops in a 400F oven and check with a thermometer through the paper: 130-135F at the centre for pink meat.
- Spanish SauceMost likely a brown sauce of the espagnole type, built on browned flour and stock with vegetables and often tomato, though the book's own recipe is worth checking before assuming. A reduced brown sauce or demi-glace serves the same purpose.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Six chops will serve three if you allow two each, or six as a lighter course. Serve the chops in their paper if you want the aroma at the table, with the sauce alongside.
The name is generally traced to Madame de Maintenon, whom Louis XIV is said to have married secretly and morganatically, and who was never queen; by the nineteenth century "à la Maintenon" had settled in French professional cookery as shorthand for a cutlet spread with a thick mushroom-and-onion mixture and cooked in a paper case — a formula that passed into the repertoire American cooking schools inherited. Fannie Farmer's book is full of such borrowings: the Boston Cooking School taught a simplified restaurant French alongside baked beans and Indian pudding, apparently on the assumption that a middle-class household with one servant could still put a dish with a title on the table. The paper case is the practical heart of the thing, and it belongs to an era when a chop was often broiled over coals, though gas ranges were already in use, and when a wrapper kept butter and mushroom juices from dropping into the fire.