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Mutton Cutlets
(Prague.) Cut up a neck of mutton, and boil the cutlets in sufficient stock to cover, with an onion, a carrot, and some herbs for 3/4 hour. Drain them, make a sauce of 1 spoonful each of flour and butter, 1 cup of boiling milk, salt, pepper, 1/2 cup of grated horseradish, the juice of 1/2 a lemon, and yolk of 1 egg. Pour this around the chops, dust them with some bread-crumbs, and brown in a hot oven. Serve with spinach or potatoes.
A simple braise-then-glaze dish: the cutlets are poached in stock, sauced, crumbed and browned. The sauce is the part that needs attention, since it carries both raw horseradish and an egg yolk.
- Neck of muttonThe neck gives small, well-marbled cutlets on the bone, and few butchers cut it now. Ask for lamb neck chops or middle-neck slices; shoulder chops also work. Mutton (sheep over about two years) is sold mainly by halal and specialist butchers, and if you use it the 45-minute simmer is a minimum rather than a maximum.
- "Sufficient stock to cover"About 1 quart for six cutlets in a wide pan. Keep it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, or the meat tightens before it becomes tender. Save the cooking liquid; a splash of it loosens the sauce if it stiffens.
- A spoonfulIn recipes of this kind a cooking spoonful is usually taken to mean a tablespoon, though the term is not always precise. So about 1 tablespoon flour and 1 tablespoon butter, cooked together briefly before the cup of boiling milk goes in — a small roux for quite a thick sauce, which is what you want if it is to sit around the chops without running off.
- The egg yolk is the hingeTake the sauce off the heat before the yolk goes in, and add it with a little of the hot sauce stirred into it first. Returned to a boil, it will curdle and the horseradish sauce becomes grainy.
- HorseradishHalf a cup means freshly grated root, not the jarred cream-style relish, which is mostly mayonnaise or vinegar and would make the sauce thin and sharp. Prepared grated horseradish in vinegar is an acceptable substitute if drained; add it at the end, since heat drives off the pungency fast.
- A hot oven425–450F. This is a browning step only, five to ten minutes, or run it under a broiler. Longer and the sauce breaks and the crumbs blacken. Dry crumbs brown better if you dot them with a little butter first.
- Yield and servingA neck yields roughly six to eight small cutlets, serving three or four. Spinach, wilted and buttered, or plain boiled potatoes are the period pairing and still the right one — the sauce is rich and needs something unseasoned beside it.
The Prague attribution places this among the Central European horseradish dishes, where grated root — křen in Czech — is a staple condiment for boiled meats in the way mustard is further west, and appears in a whole family of cream and bread sauces served with boiled beef and pork. The technique itself is older and broadly European: poach a cheap cut until tender, nap it with a sauce, crumb it and brown it, so that a piece of neck arrives at the table looking like an entrée. Mutton was the ordinary sheep meat in a way it no longer is in English-speaking markets, which is why a modern cook has to translate the cut as well as the timings.