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Entrées: Filets
Filets de mouton à la Française are mutton chops cut from the loin, broiled and served with fried potatoes.
ENTRÉES.
Petits filets de mouton au chevreuil, or à la Chasseur, are slices cut from the fillet or under part of the loin, larded, soaked in marinade, and braised; served with Chevreuil sauce and French beans. Dressed in this manner they are also served aux épinards, with spinach; à la Macédoine, with a Macedoine garnish; or à l'Almeria, with a compote of grapes. à la minute are cooked in stock with bacon, and served in the sauce. à l'Orient are dressed with savoury tomato rice, and curry sauce with olives. à la Palestine are served with a purée of Jerusalem artichokes. Noisettes de mouton à la Syrienne are little slices from a neck or loin of mutton, served with savoury rice, and Indian sauce with sultanas or raisins. À la Parisienne, they are dressed on croûtes of fried bread with slices of tomatoes, and are served with Suprême sauce. The chump end of the loin, cut in thin slices, is dressed as Escalopes de mouton aux fines herbescooked with butter, flour, stock, chopped mushrooms, etc.; served with a garnish of fried croûtons, or sippits, of bread.
Mutton, cut small and dressed eight ways. Everything on this page turns on two things a modern shopper no longer has: mature sheep, and a butcher who will break down a loin to order.
- Mutton is not lambThe book means a grown sheep. The meat is darker, firmer, considerably fatter and much stronger in flavour, and it rewards the braising and marinading this page keeps calling for. A butcher today will sell you lamb unless you ask; lamb cooks faster, tastes milder, and will fall apart in a long braise. Mutton and hogget can be ordered, and these dishes are built for them.
- Filet means the little muscle under the loinNot a fillet in the loose modern sense. Petits filets, noisettes, escalopes and the chump end are all named here, and together they amount to a map of one loin divided. In a butcher’s current vocabulary you are asking for loin chops, the cannon or loin fillet, and chump chops.
- Larding was a response to lean meatThreading strips of pork fat through the meat with a needle, as the page directs for the petits filets au chevreuil, was necessary when a lean cut faced a long braise. Well-marbled modern lamb does not need it, and barding — tying fat round the outside — gets most of the benefit with none of the equipment.
- Mutton impersonating venisonAu chevreuil means in the manner of roebuck, and the recipe follows through: larded, soaked in marinade, braised, served in Chevreuil sauce. The same dish is also offered à la Chasseur. Dressing sheep to eat like game was a recognised ambition, and nothing in modern cooking corresponds to it.
- The second half of the name is the garnishÀ la Macédoine is a diced vegetable mixture, à l’Almeria grapes, à la Palestine a purée of Jerusalem artichokes, aux épinards spinach. Once you know twenty of these tags you can read a long menu quickly, which is precisely the skill the book is selling.
- SippitsThe page’s fried croutons, or sippits, of bread are sippets: small fingers or triangles of bread fried in fat and set round a dish to take up sauce. The word has gone and the thing has not; it is the cheapest way to improve almost anything on this page.
Mutton was the ordinary meat of this table, and the page shows a kitchen taking one loin and getting eight differently named dishes out of it — chops from the loin, slices from the fillet, noisettes from the neck end, escalopes from the chump. That is household economy dressed as fashion. It also explains the portions, which look miserly to a modern eye: these are entrées, arriving with five or six other courses still to come, so two small slices on a croûte of fried bread was a reasonable serving. The plainest entry on the page, mutton chops broiled with fried potatoes, is the one the book calls à la Française.