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Game Cutlets
Take any cold cooked game and cut the flesh into dice. Soak a third of an ounce of gelatine for an hour and a half in a breakfast cupful of water. Put two tablespoonfuls of butter into a fryingpan; when it is hot add one tablespoonful of flour, mix well until brown and quite smooth, add a pint of rich stock, one egg, four cloves, a tablespoonful of onion juice, and salt and pepper to taste; simmer for ten minutes and pour it over the game. Return all to the pan and simmer for a quarter of an hour longer. Beat one egg in a basin, add it to the gelatine, stir it into the mixture and remove from the fire at once. Put the pan into a larger one with cold water so that it will cool, stirring well. When cold, turn the mixture into a shallow bakingdish smoothing it to about an inch in thickness and set it on the ice to get hard; cut it into cutlet shapes with a knife that has been dipped in water, then place the dish in another one of warm water to loosen the cutlets from the bottom. Prepare one quart of game forcemeat, cover the cutlets over with it and return them to the ice again. Beat two eggs in a basin, remove the cutlets from the ice and cover them over with the eggs and afterwards with breadcrumbs; put two or three at a time into a frying basket, plunge them into boiling fat and fry for two minutes; take them out, drain and put them on brown paper until drained. Stick a bone in the end of each, garnish it with a paperfrill, arrange the cutlets in a circle on a dish, and serve with parsley.
This is a Victorian trompe-l'oeil dish: a stiff, gelatine-bound game hash chilled hard, cut to the shape of chops, jacketed in forcemeat and fried. The hinge is the chilling — if the mixture is not genuinely firm all the way through, the cutlets collapse in the fat.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Use 1 cup of cold water to bloom the gelatine.
- A third of an ounce of gelatineAbout 9-10 g, or roughly three level teaspoons of modern powdered gelatine — a little over one standard 7 g envelope. Sheet gelatine of equivalent bloom works if you weigh it.
- The eggs in the sauceThe egg beaten into the bloomed gelatine goes in at the very end: stir it through and take the pan from the fire at once, exactly as written, or it will scramble.
- Rich stockA pint means a well-reduced brown game or veal stock with real body, not canned broth. If your stock does not set to a soft jelly on its own when cold, reduce it further before measuring.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on a fine rasp and press the pulp through a sieve; one tablespoon takes about half a medium onion. Grated onion left in the mixture gives a coarser texture.
- Set it on the iceThis is refrigeration, not freezing. Chill the sheet at least three to four hours until fully firm, and cool the hot mixture quickly in the ice-water bath first rather than putting a warm pan straight into the cold.
- Game forcemeatA quart is a great deal of forcemeat for one batch of cutlets — scale it to what you actually need to coat them. Build it from cooked game and a panada, or poach the forcemeat-jacketed cutlets briefly before crumbing: two minutes in fat will brown a raw ground-meat coating without cooking it through.
- Boiling fatHot deep fat, in the region of 360-375F; the recipe specifies only 'boiling fat'. Two minutes is enough only because the filling is already cooked and cold; the point is colour and a set crust, and longer frying will soften the gelatine core.
- Yield and serviceAn inch-thick sheet made from a pint of stock plus the diced meat will give roughly eight to twelve cutlets, serving four to six. The bone stuck in the end is a cutlet bone saved from the roast game, purely for looks.
Oscar Tschirky's book (1896) came out of a hotel kitchen where nothing cold was ever wasted and everything was expected to arrive at the table looking like something grander than it was. Cutlets of this kind belong to the same family as chaud-froid and croquettes: leftover roast game, bound with aspic-strength stock and gelatine, chilled to a sliceable block, then disguised in the outline of a chop complete with a bone pushed into the narrow end and a paper frill to hide the join. The frill itself, the papillote, was standard restaurant dress for rib chops and was reused here as an honest signal of a dishonest shape. Dishes built this way flourished because large kitchens broke down whole game birds and joints daily and needed a second, salable life for the trim — and because Victorian and Edwardian diners took genuine pleasure in food that imitated other food.