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Normandy Cutlets
(A convent recipe.) Dip 4 thick slices of stale bread in sufficient custard to moisten, dip in crumbs, and fry in butter. Serve with baked apples and a sauce of sugar, water, cider, and cinnamon, cooked until it is thick and poured over. Put a little currant or plum jam on each apple.
This is pain perdu dressed as a savoury course, and the whole effect depends on the bread being dry enough to drink the custard without collapsing. The original assumes you know what a custard is, so the quantities below are the gaps worth filling.
- The custardThe custom -- A plain pouring custard will serve: roughly 1 cup milk to 2 eggs, sweetened lightly if at all. It should moisten the bread, not soak it to mush, so dip briefly rather than leaving the slices to sit.
- Stale bread is not optionalCut slices about 3/4 inch thick from a firm white loaf a day or two old. Fresh bread turns to paste in the custard and falls apart in the pan; if your bread is soft, dry the slices in a 300F oven for ten minutes first.
- CrumbsDry breadcrumbs, not fresh, and not panko, which browns pale and coarse. The crumb coat gives these the look of a crumbed cutlet, which is presumably the source of the name.
- FryingClarified butter, or a mix of butter and a neutral oil, over medium heat. Whole butter alone can brown its milk solids and darken the crumbs; two to three minutes a side is enough.
- Baked applesCore four firm cooking apples, stand them in a dish with a little water, and bake at 350F for 40 to 50 minutes until tender but still holding shape. Start them before you fry, since the cutlets should be served straight from the pan.
- The cider sauceRoughly equal parts hard or sweet cider and water, sugar to taste, a piece of cinnamon stick, reduced over a brisk heat until it coats a spoon, 10 to 15 minutes. It thickens by evaporation alone, so use a wide pan and pull it off before it goes to caramel.
- Cider, then and nowIn British usage cider means the fermented drink, and that is the likelier reading here. Modern unfiltered apple cider or juice works, but the sauce will be sweeter and flatter; a splash of cider vinegar restores some of the edge.
- YieldFour servings, one slice and one apple each. The jam goes into the hollow of each baked apple just before serving.
"Cutlet" here is a kitchen joke of a very old kind: bread crumbed and fried in butter takes on the brown, breaded look of a veal or lamb cutlet, and cooks have been giving meatless dishes meat names for as long as there have been fast days to get through. The calendar demanded meatless meals through Lent and on Fridays and vigils. Normandy earns its place on the plate through the apples and the cider rather than through any documented Norman original; the region's cooking has long been shorthand in English and French cookbooks alike for anything built on apples, butter and cream. The dish belongs to the broad family of pain perdu, "lost bread", the standard thrifty use for a stale loaf across Europe.