Pare well the minion fillets from the mutton; cut them lengthwise through their thickness, pare and season with salt, then bread-crumb them English style (No. 13), and broil to a fine color. Dress these on a hot dish and sprinkle over with either maitre-d'hotel butter (No. 581) or else a thickened maitre-d'hotel sauce (No. 493).
Ranhofer writes in shorthand for a professional brigade, and this entry leans on three cross-references he expected the cook to already know. Once those are unpacked it is a fast broiled cutlet with a compound butter.
The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summary of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its mutton chapter is a good index of how much sheep Americans ate before beef and lamb crowded it out. The dish itself is French kitchen grammar rather than a regional specialty: a la maitre-d'hotel means dressed with the parsley-and-lemon butter named for the head of household service, a preparation generally traced to early nineteenth-century French practice and by Ranhofer's day already the default finish for anything grilled quickly. The breadcrumb coating is labeled "English style" because French cooking books of the period used a l'anglaise for the flour-egg-crumb sequence, distinguishing it from the batters and forcemeats used elsewhere. That two techniques with two nationalities attached sit in one three-line recipe is characteristic of the book, which was written for cooks fluent enough in both to need only the reference number.