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To Fry Lamb Steaks
Dip the steaks into well beaten egg, cover with cracker crumbs and fry in hot lard or butter. Mashed potatoes and boiled rice are a great improvement. Thicken your gravy with flour and butter; add little lemon juice and pour hot upon the steaks. Garnish the dish with spoonfuls of rice, here and there.
A plain breaded pan-fry with a quick pan gravy. The original assumes you know your cut, your fat and your doneness, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- What a lamb steak isThe recipe does not say which cut. In books of this period the term is generally taken as a crosscut steak from the leg or a shoulder chop. Either works; leg steaks are leaner and cook faster, shoulder has more connective tissue and benefits from being pounded slightly to an even thickness.
- Cracker crumbsPlain soda crackers crushed fine; avoid sweetened crumbs such as graham. Panko or dry breadcrumbs substitute directly. Season the crumbs — the recipe gives no salt at all, and breading absorbs it.
- Make the coating stickPat the steaks dry, then flour lightly before the egg. Egg on damp meat slides off in the pan and takes the crumbs with it. Let the breaded steaks rest ten minutes before frying.
- Fat and heat"Hot lard or butter" gives no number; aim for a brisk frying heat, hot enough to set the crumbs at once. Whole butter alone will brown and burn at that heat, so use clarified butter, or lard, or half butter and half a neutral oil. Enough to film the pan generously, say a quarter inch.
- DonenessTwo to three minutes a side for a 3/4-inch leg steak gives about medium, by which time the crumb coating should be golden. Shoulder chops want a few minutes longer over lower heat. Cooked well through, as was often the habit with lamb and mutton, these turn dry.
- The gravyPour off most of the fat, then work equal parts soft butter and flour into a paste and whisk it into a cup of hot stock or the pan juices — this is a beurre manié, and it must simmer a minute or two to lose the raw flour taste. Add the lemon juice off the heat, a teaspoon at a time, and taste; it is there to cut the fat, not to dominate.
- ServingSauce the steaks the moment the gravy is ready, or the coating softens. Figure one leg steak or one shoulder chop per person; the quantities are entirely up to you, as the original names none.
Breading a chop in egg and cracker crumbs was a common American treatment for small cuts of meat in the late nineteenth century, and it suggests how cheap and widely available the soda cracker had become — crushed crackers did duty as breading, thickener and stuffing. The lemon juice in the gravy is the older English habit surviving in a plainer kitchen: lamb and mutton were traditionally served with something sharp, most often mint or caper sauce, to balance the fat. The garnish of rice "here and there" and the note that mashed potatoes and boiled rice are an improvement point to a household serving family style from a platter rather than plating individually.