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Cotelettes of Mutton, Soubise
Neatly trim and lightly flatten six nice, tender mutton chops. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Heat in a frying pan one tablespoon melted butter, then place the cotelettes in the pan, one beside another, and fry on a range for four minutes on each side. Place on a hot plate and keep hot.
Prepare a sauce Soubise. Place the Soubise sauce on a hot dish, arrange the chops over the sauce, one overlapping another, and serve.
A plain sauté of chops whose whole character comes from the sauce beneath them; the recipe assumes you have a Soubise already made from elsewhere in the book. Make the sauce first and hold it warm, because the chops take eight minutes total.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is meat from a sheep over two years old, stronger in flavour and firmer than lamb, and it is rarely stocked outside halal, Caribbean and specialist butchers. Lamb loin or rib chops substitute directly, though they are milder and cook slightly faster.
- "Cotelettes" and the flatteningCotelette is simply the French for cutlet or chop. Light flattening with the flat of a heavy knife or a cutlet bat evens the thickness so the chop cooks through in the four minutes given; it is not meant to be pounded thin.
- What Soubise isA white onion sauce: onions sweated in butter without colour, cooked soft, puréed or sieved, and bound with béchamel or a thick velouté. It should be pale ivory and sweet, never browned, so keep the heat low while the onions soften.
- Fry on a rangeThis means direct heat in the pan on the stovetop, as opposed to the oven or the grill. A tablespoon of butter alone will scorch in a hot pan; adding a little neutral oil, or clarified butter, keeps it from blackening over the eight minutes.
- Timing and thicknessFour minutes a side suits a chop about three-quarters of an inch thick and will leave it somewhere between pink and just cooked through. Thicker loin chops need a further two to three minutes, and mutton in particular benefits from a short rest before serving.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of white pepper across six chops is generous but reasonable, since it seasons only the surface. White pepper was the usual choice with pale sauces, presumably to avoid dark specks showing.
- PlatingThe sauce goes on the dish first and the chops are overlapped on top of it. Sauce poured over the meat would soften the surface the frying just built.
- YieldSix chops serve three generously as a main course, or six as one course among several.
Sauce Soubise is generally traced to the household of Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, a marshal of France under Louis XV, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. By the nineteenth century it had settled into the French repertoire as one of the standard onion-based derivatives of béchamel, carried into English and American hotel cooking by French-trained chefs, which is how it reaches a compendium like this one under a French dish name with English instructions. The pairing with mutton is deliberate: onion has long been the classic foil to sheep meat in both French and British kitchens, from onion sauce with boiled leg of mutton to the sweet allium base of a navarin, and a smooth pale Soubise does the same work with more polish.