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Mutton or Lamb Cutlets
Cut them from the loin (or they may be cut from the neck) and trim neatly. Lay aside the bits of bone and meat you cut off to make gravy. Pour a little melted butter over the cutlets, and let them lie in it for fourteen minutes, keeping them just warm enough to prevent the butter from hardening; then dip each in beaten egg, roll in bread or cracker crumbs and lay them in a dripping pan with very little water at the bottom. Bake quickly and baste often with butter and water. Stew the bones in water enough to cover them; season with sweet herbs, pepper and salt, with a spoonful of tomato catsup. Strain, thicken with browned flour and pour over the cutlets. Serve. a
A straightforward breaded chop, baked rather than fried, with a quick gravy built from the trimmings. Two details carry the dish: the crumb coating must be set by real heat, and the bones must go into the pot the moment they come off the meat.
- "Bake quickly"Read as a hot oven; in a modern range something in the region of 425-450F answers the description, though the recipe gives no figure. A moderate oven will steam the crumbs into paste rather than crisping them; the egg-and-crumb jacket depends on fast browning.
- The cutLoin chops give you the neat little "cutlet" shape; neck chops are cheaper and fattier and may need a few minutes longer. The recipe says only "trim neatly"; sheep of the period were generally smaller and leaner than modern lamb, so trim the fat cap back as suits the meat.
- DonenessLamb loin chops are best pulled at 130-135F internal, which is roughly 12-18 minutes for inch-thick chops in a hot oven. Mutton, being older meat, was usually cooked further; if you find true mutton you may prefer to cook it longer or braise it, though the recipe itself treats the two alike.
- The butter soakFourteen minutes in warm melted butter is simply a way to make the egg and crumbs adhere and to add fat that lamb from a lean animal lacked. Keep the butter barely liquid — if it gets hot it starts cooking the meat surface.
- "Very little water at the bottom"An inch is far too much; a few tablespoons only, and its job is to keep the drippings from scorching. Basting with butter and water, as directed, works, but expect the underside of the crumb to stay soft. Setting the chops on a rack over the water gives a better crust.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan until nut-coloured. It thickens less than raw flour — use about half again as much as you would normally, or start with a butter-and-flour roux cooked to the same colour.
- Sweet herbsPeriod shorthand for aromatic culinary herbs, commonly thyme, marjoram, savory or parsley, tied or tossed in loose and strained out. Not sweet in the sense of sugar.
- Tomato catsupNineteenth-century catsup was thinner, sharper and far less sweet than the modern bottle. A spoonful of tomato paste with a splash of vinegar is closer to what the writer meant.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity; figure two loin chops per person, so eight chops serves four. The gravy from that much bone and trimming will be a small amount only -- enough to spoon over rather than to pass in a boat.
Cutlets like these sit at the point where English chop-house cooking met the American household kitchen. The egg-and-crumb treatment is a standard nineteenth-century way of dressing up a small piece of meat, of a piece with the French *cotelette panee*, and the accompanying gravy made from the bones and trimmings is pure thrift. The interchangeable "mutton or lamb" of the title is worth noticing. Nineteenth-century American cooks still ate a good deal of mutton -- the meat of a sheep over a year old, stronger-flavoured and much tougher -- and sheep were kept for wool as well as for the table. Mutton had largely disappeared from American markets by the middle of the twentieth century, which is why recipes of this vintage regularly offer the two names as though they were one ingredient.