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Lamb, Fillets Of
Cut the meat from the bones of the neck, and trim off the superfluous fat. Cut into seven or eight pieces, flatten each, and shape into round fillets. Arrange a quarter of a pound of cooked rice in the centre of a round dish, and keep it in a warm place. Dip the prepared fillets in beaten egg, then in seasoned flour, and fry to a golden colour in boiling butter. Arrange them neatly round the rice. Pour a little good brown sauce round the base of the dish, and put a table-spoonful of supreme sauce (see SUPREME SAUCE) on each fillet. Probable cost, 1s. per pound.
A late-Victorian way of turning the cheap end of a lamb neck into something that looks like a restaurant plate. The technique is sound; the assembly assumes a kitchen with two sauces already standing in the bain-marie.
- The cutNeck of lamb boned out gives you the eye of meat that runs along the vertebrae — what a butcher today would call neck fillet. Ask for neck fillets and you can skip the boning entirely.
- Shaping the filletsSlice the fillet into rounds about 1 inch thick, then flatten each to roughly half an inch with the flat of a knife or a light mallet. Even thickness matters more than perfect roundness, since these cook fast and unevenly thick pieces will be raw in the middle or grey at the edge.
- "Boiling butter"This means butter hot enough to foam and subside, not butter at a rolling boil — plain butter blackens around 300F. Use clarified butter, or half butter and half neutral oil, and give the fillets two to three minutes a side.
- Seasoned flourSalt and white pepper. Egg first, then flour, as the recipe has it, is the reverse of the usual order.
- Supreme sauceA velouté of chicken stock finished with cream, in some versions enriched with egg yolk, and a separate recipe in this book (see SUPREME SAUCE). If yolks are used it must not boil once they go in. A tablespoonful per fillet is about right; make roughly a cup.
- Brown sauceThe Victorian espagnole — a roux browned slowly, moistened with brown stock, simmered and skimmed for hours. A well-reduced lamb or beef stock, thickened lightly, stands in for it without embarrassment.
- The riceThe recipe says 'a quarter of a pound of cooked rice', which may mean the weight before or after boiling. Plain boiled long-grain rice, drained dry and pressed into a mound, is what is meant; anything sticky will slump before it reaches the table.
- YieldSeven or eight fillets serve three to four as a main course, or six as a first course in the old style.
- Cost noteThe "1s. per pound" is the price of the meat in shillings when the book was compiled, not part of the method.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery ran to thousands of entries and was aimed squarely at the middle-class household with one or two servants — a kitchen that wanted the appearance of French cooking on an English budget. This entry is a good example of the compromise: the neck was among the cheapest parts of the lamb, sold for a fraction of the loin, but boned, trimmed and floured into neat rounds it could be sent up looking like noisettes. The ring of fillets around a central mound is a standard Victorian service style, and the dish is finished with doubled sauces — brown beneath, pale above. That the book assumes both a brown sauce and a supreme sauce are simply available says a good deal about how a well-run Victorian kitchen worked: the stockpot and the sauce pans were kept going more or less continuously, and individual dishes were assembled from what stood ready.