Home › The Principles of Cookery › LAMB CUTLETS (a la Jardiniere)
LAMB CUTLETS (a la Jardiniere)
Trim neatly twelve cutlets (or any other desired number). Melt two ounces of butter, and dip the cutlets in on both sides. Sprinkle a little pepper and salt on them, and cover them with bread-crumbs; then grill them over a clear fire for five or six minutes, turning them every minute. As soon as they feel firm they are done. Pile up the vegetables composing the jardiniere, garnish in the centre of a hot dish (see JARDINIERE) and stand the cutlets upright all round. Slip a little paper frill on each bone and serve at once.
A straightforward grilled crumbed cutlet, the interest lying entirely in the timing and the presentation. Two points carry the dish: the cutlets must be thin and evenly trimmed, and the fire must be clear.
- "Trim neatly"This means French-trimming: scraping the bone clean of meat and fat for an inch or so at the end, so the paper frill sits on bare bone. Ask a butcher for a rack of lamb cut into cutlets and Frenched, or do it with a small knife.
- A clear fireCharcoal burned down past the flames, or a gas grill preheated hard with no dripping fat catching. Buttered crumbs will scorch over a flaring fire long before the meat is cooked.
- Five or six minutes totalThat suits fairly thin cutlets, turned every minute as directed. Thicker chops need longer, and the finger test the recipe gives — firm to the touch — is the honest guide; an instant-read thermometer showing 130–135F gives medium-rare.
- CrumbsDry white breadcrumbs rather than coarse panko. Grate stale bread and sieve it; fine crumbs adhere to melted butter and colour evenly in the short cooking time.
- Two ounces of butterAbout 4 tablespoons, melted and used as the only binding — there is no egg wash here, so the butter must still be liquid and the cutlets dipped while it is warm.
- JardinièreThe cross-reference means the classic mixed spring vegetables: carrots and turnips cut to small batons or scooped balls, with peas and green beans, each cooked separately and tossed in butter. Cassell's expects the reader to look it up.
- Paper frillsCutlet frills are still sold, and are essentially decorative; they are also traditionally said to have let a diner lift the bone without greasing the fingers, though that explanation is folklore rather than documented.
- YieldTwelve cutlets serve four to six as a main course; the rest of the plate is the vegetable pile in the centre, so plan the jardinière generously.
À la jardinière — "gardener's style" — is one of the standard French garnishes codified in the nineteenth century, and by definition means fresh vegetables cut to shape and cooked separately so each keeps its colour. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery absorbed a great deal of this French vocabulary wholesale and expected middle-class households to reproduce it: the dictionary format, with its cross-reference to JARDINIERE, is doing the work a modern recipe headnote would. The upright arrangement of cutlets in a ring around a mound of garnish is consistent with the period's service à la russe, where dishes came to table already composed rather than being carved in front of the diners, and the paper frill belongs to the same impulse — a small piece of theatre.