Souvaroff
Ingredients.
Two pounds of small Loin of Mutton.
Two ounces of clarified Butter.
Two sliced Truffles.
One and a half gill of good Espagnole Sauce.
One small glass of Burgundy.
Cayenne. A few fresh Button Mushrooms.
Bone the loin, reserve the fillet for some other dish. Cut the thick part of the loin in slices to somewhat resemble cutlets and trim off the ends.
Cook in hot clarified butter. Boil down the wine; add the sauce, and a little cayenne. Dish the noisettes neatly. Garnish with the truffles and mushrooms, and pour the sauce round.
Noix de Bœuf à la Chipolata.
Ingredients.
One gill of Claret.
Quarter of a pint of Water.
One small Onion.
Quarter of a small Carrot.
A short, confident entrée recipe of the Escoffier era: mutton noisettes pan-fried in butter, sauced with a reduced Burgundy and espagnole. Most of the work is in what the recipe assumes you already have on hand.
- The hinge: cook the noisettes fast and rest themBoned loin cut into rounds is lean and will be dry and grey if treated like a stew. Sear in properly hot butter, roughly three to four minutes a side for a thick noisette, and rest before dishing. The recipe has the sauce poured round rather than over, which also leaves the seared surface undisturbed.
- GillsThis is a British book, so a gill is 5 fl oz — one and a half gills is about 7.5 fl oz, a scant cup. In American reprints a gill is often reckoned as 4 fl oz, which would give about 6 fl oz, three-quarters of a cup; the British reading is the right one here.
- EspagnoleThe brown mother sauce: brown roux, brown stock, mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours. Almost no domestic kitchen keeps it now. A well-reduced brown veal or lamb stock, thickened lightly, stands in; a thin commercial gravy will not, because the whole dish rests on that sauce having body and gloss.
- "One small glass of Burgundy"Unquantified. Read it as somewhere between 2 and 4 fl oz. Boil it down hard — to a syrupy spoonful or two — before the espagnole goes in, or the finished sauce tastes raw and sharp.
- MuttonMutton is sheep over two years old: darker, firmer, stronger-flavoured than lamb, and now sold mainly by specialist butchers. A two-pound loin of lamb behaves similarly but is milder and cooks a little faster.
- The reserved filletThe recipe tells you to bone the loin and set the fillet aside, which is the small tender strip beneath the backbone. That is a house economy from a kitchen cooking several dishes at once; if you are not, cook it alongside and serve it with the noisettes.
- Truffles and button mushroomsSliced black truffle was a garnish of the period, priced accordingly. The recipe does not say when to add them; adding the slices to the sauce off the heat keeps their perfume. The mushrooms should be small, white and briefly turned in butter, not stewed down.
- YieldTwo pounds of loin, once boned and trimmed, gives roughly four small entrée portions in the multi-course scheme this book assumes — two if it is the main dish of a modern dinner.
- The stray lines at the endThe claret, water, onion and carrot listed after the method belong to the following recipe, Noix de Bœuf à la Chipolata. They are not part of Souvaroff.
Dishes styled à la Souvaroff (also Suvarov, Souvarov) are generally traced to Alexander Suvorov, the eighteenth-century Russian field marshal whose name French chefs attached to a small family of rich garnishes built on truffles and Madeira — the best known being poultry sealed in a casserole with truffles and foie gras. By the time this book was written the label had loosened into a general signal of truffle and a dark wine sauce, which is what appears here. The recipe also shows how a well-appointed professional kitchen of the period actually worked: espagnole is assumed to be standing ready in the stockpot corner, the fillet is casually reserved for another service, and the cook is expected to know what a noisette looks like without being told. Mutton, now a specialist purchase, was then the ordinary meat of the British table, and dressing it as a French entrée was one way a household cook demonstrated range.