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Cheese Cutlets
1 ounce grated Parmesan
Mace cheese
Salt
3 egg-yolks
Cayenne
1 tablespoon cream
1 tablespoon thick white sauce
To the well-beaten egg-yolks, add cream and grated Parmesan cheese, and season with mace, cayenne and salt. Beat until very light and add the thick white sauce. Pour into a shallow greased pan and steam over hot water until firm. When cold, cut in shapes with a fancy cutter, dredge with grated cheese and fry in deep fat to a delicate brown. Serve at once on fried bread.
A savoury cheese custard, set over water, chilled, cut out and deep-fried — essentially a firmer cousin of the fried-cream fritters of the same era. It is a small dish, meant as an entrée course or a savoury, not a main.
- The ingredient list is mangledThe original was printed in two narrow columns and the words have interleaved. Read it as: 1 ounce grated Parmesan cheese, 3 egg yolks, 1 tablespoon cream, 1 tablespoon thick white sauce, plus mace, cayenne and salt to season.
- Thick white sauceNot a pouring béchamel. Period "thick" sauces vary, but something in the region of a tablespoon each of butter and flour to a half cup of milk, cooked until it holds its shape on the spoon, is the right idea; some period tables run heavier still. Only a tablespoon is needed here, so make it as part of another dish or accept the leftover.
- The hinge: set it slowly and chill it hardSteamed over hot water, not boiling — the water should barely tremble, or the yolks curdle and weep and the mixture will never cut cleanly. Spread it no more than half an inch deep, then refrigerate several hours or overnight. Warm custard will collapse in the fat.
- MaceThe outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold ground or as blades. A generous pinch of ground mace is enough for this quantity; nutmeg is the nearest substitute, used slightly more sparingly.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature, only "deep fat to a delicate brown"; a fat hot enough to brown quickly, in the region of 375F, suits it. The cutlets are already cooked, so they need only long enough to colour — a minute or so — and longer risks the custard inside liquefying and bursting the coating.
- DredgingA dredge of grated cheese alone is a fragile coating. For more reliable results, dry the pieces and give them an egg-and-crumb coating, with grated cheese mixed into the crumbs — a departure from the recipe as printed, but closer to the way croquettes were handled.
- Fried breadCrustless bread cut to match the cutlets and fried in butter or the same fat until crisp. Cut the bread shapes before you fry the cutlets so nothing waits.
- YieldThree yolks with a tablespoon each of cream and sauce give a very small quantity — only a few little cutlets, depending on the size of the cutter, and enough for two or three people as a course at best. Double or triple it for a dinner party.
"Cutlet" here has nothing to do with meat: it describes the shape, the flat oval or heart a fancy cutter presses out, and the treatment — crumbed and fried like a veal cutlet. Nineteenth-century cookery was full of these shape-borrowings, and a cook who could send up something breaded, browned and cutlet-shaped that turned out to be cheese, rice or salmon was demonstrating skill rather than practising deception. The placement in "Entrées and Made-Over Dishes" is the giveaway: this is a dish built from odds and ends of the larder — a tablespoon of white sauce left from another course, an ounce of Parmesan, perhaps a few yolks orphaned when the whites went into a meringue — and turned into something worth carrying to the table. Butterick, a pattern company writing for the household seamstress and home cook, published its recipe collections in the years around 1910, when this kind of thrifty French-derived cookery seems to have been widely admired in the American middle-class kitchen. Parmesan, imported and expensive, was used in small grated quantities.