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Tournedos of Lamb
Six lamb chops cut 2 inches thick, will be required. Remove bone and fat and with skewers arrange in 6 circular pieces. Around each wrap a thin strip of bacon, fastening in place with wooden skewers. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, place on well Criscoed broiler, and broil over clear fire 15 minutes. Remove to hot platter, garnish with rissole potatoes, and pass mint jelly with them. The potatoes are done in this way: Peel and wash 8 Bermuda potatoes of uniform size, put in ice water for 15 minutes, dry in a towel, and fry until delicate brown in hot Crisco. Drain on paper, then bake until soft. Remove to serving platter, and pour around 1 cup of rich white or cream sauce or 1 cup of heavy cream scalded and seasoned.
A Crisco-era broiler recipe that borrows a French beef term for lamb. Two things need attention: the shortening is doing a job you can hand to any high-smoke-point fat, and the 15-minute broil will take the lamb well past where most cooks want it.
- CriscoThe book was published to sell it, and the shortening turns up throughout, whether or not the dish needs it. Any neutral high-smoke-point fat works for oiling the broiler rack and for frying the potatoes; the shortening contributes nothing here that oil does not.
- Shaping the tournedosBoning a 2-inch loin or rib chop leaves a flat medallion of meat with a tail of thin flank. Curl that tail around the eye to make the round, wrap the bacon strip over the seam, and secure it. Wooden picks want a 20-minute soak so they do not char under the broiler; metal skewers or butcher's twine are steadier.
- Broiling timeFifteen minutes under a modern broiler gives grey, well-done lamb. Two-inch medallions want roughly 10 to 12 minutes total, turned once, pulled at 130-135F internal for medium-rare and rested 5 minutes. "Clear fire" means coals burned down past the flame stage, not a live blaze.
- BaconCut thin so it renders in the time the lamb needs. Thick-cut bacon will still be flabby when the meat is done, and the drippings can flare, so keep the pan below rather than the rack too near the element.
- Bermuda potatoesThese were early new potatoes shipped from Bermuda, small, thin-skinned and waxy. Any small waxy potato of even size stands in.
- Rissole methodThe ice-water soak firms the potatoes and rinses off surface starch; dry them thoroughly or the hot fat will spit. Fry only to colour, then finish in a moderate oven -- around 375F is a reasonable modern reading of "bake until soft" -- for 15 to 20 minutes until a skewer slides through.
- The cream sauceA cup of white sauce or scalded heavy cream is poured around the potatoes, not over them, so the browned crust survives to the table. Season the cream properly with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg; unseasoned scalded cream tastes of nothing.
- YieldSix medallions, six servings, with the potatoes and mint jelly as the whole of the garnish.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which reached American kitchens in the early 1910s; the recipes are conventional company cooking of the period with the new shortening worked through them. Tournedos is properly a French butchery term for small rounds cut from the beef fillet, generally traced to the mid-nineteenth-century Parisian restaurant kitchen, and applying it to boned lamb chops is the sort of borrowed grandeur that American cookbooks of this era liked in a dinner menu. The Bermuda potatoes are a marker of season and status: they arrived in northeastern markets in spring, ahead of the domestic crop, and were priced accordingly. Mint jelly with lamb is an English habit that had settled firmly into American service by this point, descended from the older mint sauce of vinegar, sugar and chopped mint.