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Peanut-Butter Cutlets
1½ cups peanut butter
1 teaspoon salt
1½ cups hot milk
Pepper
6 half-inch slices of bread
Mix peanut butter with hot milk and seasoning, mixing together thoroughly. Dip slices of bread into the peanut-butter mixture. Sauté in hot fat. Garnish with pickles and olives.
This dish offers both adequate protein and iron.
A wartime-era protein stretcher: bread soaked in thinned peanut butter and fried like French toast. It works, but only if the coating is loose enough to cling without sliding off.
- Get the consistency right firstPeanut butter seizes when liquid hits it, then loosens as more goes in. Add the hot milk gradually and whisk until it is the texture of thick cream; if it stays stiff, the bread will not coat evenly. Warm milk is not optional here, as cold milk makes the mixture grainy and stiff.
- The peanut butter of 1900The peanut butter of the period -- Peanut butter of this era was generally freshly ground peanuts, sometimes with salt, and little else. Use a natural, unsweetened grind and stir it well; modern sweetened, hydrogenated brands will scorch faster in the pan and push the dish toward dessert.
- BreadHalf-inch slices of a firm white sandwich loaf, a day old. Fresh soft bread collapses under the weight of the coating. Dip briefly on both sides rather than soaking.
- "Sauté in hot fat"Butter, lard or a neutral oil, about a quarter inch in a heavy skillet over medium heat. Peanut butter has enough sugar and protein to brown quickly, so a hot-hot pan will darken the crust before the inside warms through.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt across the whole batch is modest if the peanut butter is already salted. Taste the mixture before dipping and adjust; it should taste slightly over-seasoned cold, since the bread dilutes it.
- YieldSix cutlets, serving three as a main course with a vegetable, or six as a supper dish. The pickles and olives in the original are doing real work by cutting the richness, so do not skip the acid.
- The nutrition claimThe protein statement holds up reasonably well; the iron claim reflects period enthusiasm more than analysis. Peanut butter contributes some non-heme iron, but this is not an iron-rich dish by modern reckoning.
Peanut butter entered American cookery as a health food rather than a children's staple, promoted through sanitariums and vegetarian circles in the 1890s and marketed as an easily digested protein for people who ate no meat. A recipe like this one reflects that moment: it is organized around replacing the meat course, and the word "cutlet" is doing deliberate work, borrowing the shape and the plating of a chop so the plate would look conventional. Garnishing with pickles and olives appears to follow the same logic, such relishes being commonly served beside a fried cutlet. The closing sentence about protein and iron is typical of household manuals of the period, which had absorbed the new vocabulary of food chemistry and liked to attach a nutritional verdict to a recipe, generally with more confidence than the underlying data supported.