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Deviled Cutlets
Trim and boil cutlets of lamb or mutton, and when nearly done season them with one-fourth saltspoonful of cayenne well mixed with half teaspooonful of salt, and roll each cutlet in chutney. Return to the grill, finish cooking on both sides and serve with lettuce salad and a French dressing or with potato salad.
A short grill recipe that hinges on a probable typesetting error and on one archaic measure. Read it as broiled lamb rib chops finished with a chutney glaze.
- "Boil" means broilThe instruction to "return to the grill" makes it clear the cutlets were never meant to go into water. Cook them under a hot broiler or over coals from the start; boiled lamb chops rolled in chutney would be dismal.
- A saltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so one-fourth of one is about a sixteenth of a teaspoon of cayenne — a genuine pinch, not a devilling in the modern sense. Scale it up to a scant quarter teaspoon if you want the heat the title promises.
- CutletsIn period usage a lamb or mutton cutlet is a rib chop, trimmed of most fat and with the bone scraped clean. Buy rib or loin chops about three-quarters of an inch thick; mutton, from an adult sheep, is hard to find in ordinary American markets today.
- ChutneyMost likely a bottled sweet-sour mango chutney of the kind then sold. Chop any large fruit pieces so the coating clings, and expect the sugar in it to catch quickly under direct heat.
- Timing and heatBring the chops to about 125F before they are coated, then give them only a minute or two a side to set and lightly char the chutney. Pull at 130–135F for medium rare; the glaze will burn long before a well-done chop is ready.
- YieldFigure two to three rib chops per person as a main course, one apiece if the dish is part of a luncheon spread.
Devilling — coating meat, fish or poultry in something hot and sharp, then finishing it over fierce heat — was a fixture of Victorian and Edwardian cooking, and a well-established way of dressing up cold roast or second-day meat. British households had long since picked up mango chutney from the Anglo-Indian table, and by the time this book appeared bottled chutney was familiar enough that the recipe can call for it without comment. The pairing with a lettuce salad and French dressing, or potato salad, suggests a luncheon dish of the sort a turn-of-the-century cook book might set apart from the heavier dinner service.