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Chicken Cutlets
(A recipe of Provence.) Chop very fine the meat of a fowl, to make 2 cupfuls; it must be cooked first. Add 2 ounces of butter, salt, pepper, and 1/2 cup of rich milk or cream. Divide into balls, flatten like a chop, dip in egg or bread-crumbs, and fry in hot fat. Arrange on a dish, with tomato sauce.
CUTLETS OF CHICKEN (invented for one of the French monarchs.). Cut up the meat of 1/2 a chicken,--that cooked in the soup will answer best,--add 6 mushrooms, and 1/2 ounce cooked and chopped beef tongue. Fry these in 2 ounces of butter, with 2 teaspoonfuls of chopped onion and 1 ounce of flour. Add, next, 1 pint of chicken broth, and cook until a smooth paste, stirring often. Add yolks of 2 eggs, juice of a lemon, some parsley, and salt. If too thin, pour off, by straining, half the sauce, and let it harden in a pan. Mould into cutlets and dip each in the sauce, then in crumbs. Fry in butter or lard and serve in a circle, with the sauce diluted with 1/2 cup of boiling milk.
Two versions of the same idea: cooked chicken bound into a paste, shaped like a chop, crumbed and fried. Neither is a cutlet in the butcher's sense, and both live or die on how firm the mixture is before it meets the fat.
- Chill before shapingBoth mixtures handle far better if spread in a shallow pan and chilled until firm, an hour or so, longer for the second version; otherwise the cutlets tend to slump in the fat. The second version's own instruction to "let it harden in a pan" follows the straining of the sauce, and can be read as applying either to the sauce or to the mixture as a whole.
- Weights and measuresTwo cupfuls of finely chopped cooked fowl is roughly 10 oz, about the yield of half a 3½ lb chicken. Two ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons; 1 ounce of flour is a scant ¼ cup; a pint of broth here means 2 cups.
- "Rich milk or cream"Half-and-half or light cream. The first version has no flour or crumb binder, so use no more than the ½ cup given or the paste will not hold a shape even chilled.
- "Dip in egg or bread-crumbs"Read this as egg and crumbs: beaten egg first, then fine dry crumbs, pressed on. Egg alone will not survive frying, and dry crumbs will not stick to a bare surface.
- FryingDeep or shallow fat at 350–365F. Fry in batches without crowding, three to four minutes, until the crust is set and coloured — the filling is already cooked, so this is about the coating only.
- The egg yolks in the second versionAdd the yolks and lemon juice off the heat and stir them in fast. If the pan is still boiling the yolks curdle and the sauce turns grainy instead of setting the paste.
- Beef tongue and mushroomsHalf an ounce of cooked tongue is a seasoning, not a filling; cooked ham can stand in. The six mushrooms should be chopped and cooked until their water has gone, or the mixture stays too loose to mould.
- YieldEach version makes about eight cutlets, enough for four as a main course with the tomato sauce, or six as an entrée in the older sense of a middle course.
Both of these are croquettes dressed up as chops — the mixture moulded to a cutlet shape, sometimes with a bit of macaroni or a clove pushed in to imitate the bone, and sent to table in a ring. The form was a staple of nineteenth-century French professional cookery, where something of this sort — occasionally filed under côtelettes de volaille, though that name more usually denotes a boned breast cutlet — turned yesterday's boiled fowl into a presentable entrée, and the phrase "that cooked in the soup will answer best" tells you exactly what the dish was for: using up the bird that had already given its flavour to the stockpot. The claim that it was "invented for one of the French monarchs" is the sort of attribution cookbooks of the period attached freely to anything shaped and sauced, and should be treated as tradition rather than record. Adelaide Keen's With a Saucepan over the Sea (1902) gathered dishes country by country, which is why the first version arrives labelled as Provençal and the second, richer and bound with a velouté, as court cooking.