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Braised Mutton Cutlets
Take about three pounds of cutlets, trim and put them into a pan to braise. When done, remove, place them on a board with a weight on top to keep them in shape while they are getting cold. Trim them again, mask on one side with six ounces of quenelle forcemeat, and then dip them into a mixture of finely-minced tongues and truffles. Place them in a saucepan with three gills of brown sauce, cover with buttered paper and cook very slowly for fifteen minutes. Place a border of mashed potatoes on a dish, lay the cutlets on it, garnish the center with strips of tongue and gherkin mixed with the white of an egg, pour the sauce around, and serve.
A late-Victorian hotel dish written for a brigade that already had brown sauce, forcemeat and cooked tongue on hand. The work is nearly all in the cooling and coating; the final fifteen minutes is only to set the crust and warm the meat through.
- The hinge: press and chill firstThe cutlets must be completely cold and firm before you mask them, or the forcemeat slides off and the shape collapses. Weight them between two boards or trays and refrigerate several hours, ideally overnight.
- MuttonTrue mutton (sheep over two years) is rare outside halal and specialist butchers. Lamb rib or loin chops behave the same way here, though they braise faster and taste much milder; if you want the older flavor, ask for hogget.
- Braising, unstatedThe book does not describe the method: brown the cutlets, add stock or brown sauce to come partway up, cover, and hold at a bare simmer or in a moderate oven (around 325F) until tender -- perhaps 1 to 1 1/2 hours for mutton, rather less for lamb.
- Three gillsA gill is half a cup, so three gills is 1 1/2 cups of brown sauce. In a kitchen of this kind that most likely means a real espagnole or a reduced demi-glace rather than thickened pan drippings.
- Quenelle forcemeatSix ounces of veal or chicken forcemeat: lean meat pounded or processed with a panade or egg white and cream until smooth and pale. A modern food processor does in two minutes what a mortar took twenty to do; keep everything ice cold so it does not break.
- Buttered paperA cartouche, cut to the diameter of the pan and laid directly on the food. Parchment does the job; it keeps the coating moist without the condensation that a tight lid would drop back onto it.
- Tongue and trufflesCooked salt-cured beef tongue, sliced thin and minced fine, is still sold by good delicatessens. The truffle here was most likely preserved (tinned) black truffle; a small quantity of the real thing, or good truffle peelings, is closer to the intent than truffle oil.
- The egg-white garnishRaw egg white binds the tongue and gherkin strips into a mound. It is not cooked at any point, and there is no reason to keep it: the garnish holds together well enough tossed with a little of the sauce or a spoonful of melted aspic.
- YieldThree pounds of cutlets serves six, with the potato border and sauce standing in for any other vegetable.
Braised cutlets masked with forcemeat and crumbed in minced tongue and truffle are a standard of the Escoffier-era hotel repertoire, where the same base preparation reappeared under a dozen garnish names; the technique of chilling meat under a weight so it can be trimmed to an exact shape and coated belongs squarely to that kitchen, which cooked in the morning and finished to order at night. Mutton was among the common red meats of the nineteenth-century English-speaking table, and its near-disappearance from American markets in the twentieth century is one of the sharper breaks between this book and a present-day one. Oscar Tschirky, who was maitre d'hotel rather than chef at the Waldorf, collected recipes in this compressed professional shorthand throughout the 1896 volume, assuming a reader with brown sauce and forcemeat already at hand.