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LAMB'S FRY (another way)
Soak the fry in cold water for half an hour. Drain it, put it into a saucepan with as much cold water as will cover it, and add two or three green onions, a carrot, a bunch of parsley, and a small sprig of thyme. Simmer very gently for an hour and a half, then pour both gravy and fry into a bowl, and let all get cold together. Drain and dry the meat, cut it into neat slices, dip half of these into beaten egg, and afterwards into bread-crumbs, and, a few minutes before serving, fry them in hot butter until they are lightly browned on both sides. Strain the gravy, put it into a saucepan, with an ounce of fresh butter rolled in flour, a finely-minced shallot, three table-spoonfuls of finely-grated bread-crumbs, a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, half a tea-spoonful of salt, and a pinch of pepper. Simmer for half an hour. Stir in all the meat which is not intended to be fried first, cutting it as small as possible, and, while it is heating, fry the slices of liver, etc., in fat. Put these in a hot dish, squeeze the juice of a lemon over them, pour the sauce into the centre, and serve as hot as possible. Garnish with thin rashers of fried bacon. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for four persons.
A Victorian way of stretching a set of lamb's offal into a dish for four: everything is poached in an aromatic broth, then half is crumbed and fried and the rest chopped into a sauce built from its own cooking liquor. Order the components separately from a butcher and treat them by weight rather than hunting for a "fry".
- What a lamb's fry isIn British butchery of the period, the fry is the pluck cut up for the pan — commonly liver, heart, sweetbreads and sometimes lights (lungs); elsewhere the word is also used for testicles. Lungs cannot be sold for food in the United States; build the dish from about 1 to 1.5 lb of lamb's liver, heart and sweetbreads in whatever proportion you can get.
- Timing by componentNinety minutes of gentle simmering suits heart and sweetbreads. Liver at that length turns grainy and grey, which is partly why the recipe crumbs and re-fries it. If you want liver worth eating, poach the tougher pieces the full time and give the liver eight to ten minutes near the end.
- Sweetbreads want pressingThe instruction to cool the meat in its own liquor is not idle. Sweetbreads set firm as they cool and slice cleanly; drained warm they crumble. Cool them under a plate with a light weight if you want tidy slices.
- Green onionsHere these are spring onions or young scallions, not the American green tops of storage onions. Two or three whole ones, trimmed.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié — one ounce (2 tbsp) of soft butter kneaded with roughly the same volume of flour, whisked into the simmering liquor in small pieces to thicken it. It should not be melted in first.
- Crumbs in the sauceThree tablespoons of fine dry breadcrumbs are a thickener as much as the flour, and they swell over the half-hour simmer. The result is a thick, almost porridge-like sauce by modern standards; slacken it with more of the strained broth if it stiffens too far.
- Frying fatThe recipe says butter for the crumbed slices and "fat" further down — probably dripping or lard in the original kitchen. Butter alone browns fast at the heat needed; clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, holds up better.
- Cost and yieldOne shilling and sixpence to feed four was cheap, which is the point of the dish. It serves four as written, with the fried slices in a hot dish and the sauce poured into the centre.
Offal was the working economy of the Victorian kitchen, and Cassell's treats it with the same care it gives a saddle of mutton \_ this is the second of the book's methods for lamb's fry, following an earlier one. "Fry" here is an old collective noun for the pluck of a young animal, sold as a set by the butcher and, by a derivation often said to rest on what was done with it, named accordingly; the same word survives in Australia and New Zealand, where lamb's fry and bacon remained a standard breakfast well into the twentieth century. The technique on display is thoroughly French in its bones: a court-bouillon of onion, carrot, parsley and thyme, the meat cooled in its own liquor to stay moist, the liquor then bound with beurre manié and returned to the plate as sauce. Nothing is thrown away, and the finished dish flatters cheap material by giving half of it a crisp crumb and the other half a role as the thickening of its own gravy.