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Fried Fillets of Mutton
Cut two pounds of cutlets from the middle of a loin of mutton, remove the fat and skin and cut into slices about one-half inch thick; flatten them with a cutlet bat and dip them into beaten egg, and then into sifted breadcrumbs. Sprinkle lightly with pepper and salt and let them remain for about one hour. Put some butter in a fryingpan, and when it is hot put in the fillets and fry on both sides until they are quite done and of a nice brown color. Place them on a dish, garnish with asparagus, seakale or cauliflower, and serve. Fillets of Mutton, Minute Style Put some good strong stock into a saucepan, reduce it quickly to a glaze, add a slice of fat bacon and as many fillets of mutton as required. Cover over with a piece of well-buttered paper and simmer gently over a slow fire for ten or twelve minutes, when they will be done and well glazed, but care must be taken to prevent the bacon from burning. Place the meat on a dish, add a little stock to the liquor in the pan to heat, pour it over the fillets, and serve hot.
Two related preparations of thin boneless mutton loin, one breaded and pan-fried, one braised down in a meat glaze. Both are quick; the risk in each is overcooking.
- Mutton is the hingeTrue mutton, from sheep generally reckoned at more than a year or two old, is scarce outside halal butchers and some farm suppliers. Boneless lamb loin, or loin chops with the bone cut away, is the practical substitute, but it is milder and leaner and will cook faster than the original intends.
- Cutlet batA flat-faced meat mallet or the bottom of a small heavy pan. Pound the half-inch slices to a scant quarter inch between sheets of plastic, working from the centre out so they spread rather than tear.
- "Quite done" is not well done"Quite done" need not mean well done -- At a quarter inch these fillets cook in a minute or two a side. Lamb and mutton loin dries out and turns woolly if pushed far past medium, so pull them off while the crumbs are still just brown; a slice this thin is too thin to judge with a thermometer.
- Butter alone will burnPlain butter at the heat needed to brown crumbs blackens quickly. Clarified butter, or butter cut half and half with a neutral oil, gives the same flavour without the scorched milk solids.
- The hour's restNot idleness. The egg-and-crumb coating hydrates and grips the meat, so it stays on in the pan. Keep the breaded fillets uncovered on a rack in the refrigerator rather than at room temperature.
- Reducing stock "to a glaze"A well-gelled brown stock boiled down until it coats a spoon and barely films the pan bottom, only a few tablespoons for a pan of fillets. Start with about a cup and a half of unsalted stock; salted commercial broth becomes inedible at that concentration.
- The buttered paperA cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered on the underside and laid directly on the meat. It traps steam and keeps the glaze from drying out over the low heat.
- SeakaleA blanched winter vegetable, once common in English kitchens and now rarely sold. Cardoon stalks, blanched Belgian endive or simply the asparagus or cauliflower the recipe also names will serve.
- YieldTwo pounds of trimmed loin gives four generous portions, or six if the plate carries a substantial vegetable garnish.
Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896, was written for a New York hotel kitchen that still worked in a largely French idiom. Mutton was ordinary meat in the nineteenth century, cheap and strongly flavoured, and cookbooks of the era give it considerable space; over the course of the twentieth century American consumption declined in favour of young lamb, which is why the cut in this recipe now has to be explained. The second version's name, "Minute Style," is often said to point to the same commercial logic behind a la minute cookery generally: a hotel that fed hundreds to order needed dishes that could be finished quickly, and a loin cooked down in a reduced glaze was one way to get there.