Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Entrées: Lambs
Lambs' Feet are dressed en marinade and à la poulette, in the same manner as sheep's feet.
As- Pieds d'agneau farcis, they are stuffed; served in Hollandaise sauce with chopped gherkins.
Casserole de riz aux pieds d'agneau-stewed and served in a casserole, or baked shape, of rice.
Lambs' tails are dressed in the same way.
Queues d'agneau à la crémière are Lambs' Tails ENTRÉES. braised and served in white sauce with whipped cream, etc.
Cervelles d'agneau à l'innocent are Lambs' Brains cut in thin slices and put in paper cases with white sauce, chopped parsley, etc., sprinkled with breadcrumbs and browned.
Lambs' Ears are stewed and served as- Oreilles d'agneau farcies, filled with a stuffing of veal forcemeat, etc., breadcrumbed and fried; served on a border, with Italian sauce. à la Ravigote are served on a forcemeat border, with Ravigote sauce. à la Marquise are served on a border with a peeled plover's egg in each ear. White sauce with cream, cocks' combs, mushrooms, etc., in the centre.
Langues d'agneau à la Persane are stewed Lambs' Tongues, cut in halves and dressed in a circle, covered with a white sauce with wine, mushrooms, etc., sprinkled with breadcrumbs and baked; served with white sauce.
Feet, tails, brains, ears and tongues — the parts of the animal that cost least, given the most elaborate treatment on any page of the book.
- Some of this cannot be boughtLambs’ ears are not sold. Lambs’ tails are not sold. The dishes built on them — stuffed ears standing on a forcemeat border with a plover’s egg in each, tails braised in a cream sauce — survive only as descriptions, and that is worth knowing before you go looking.
- Trotters are the one to actually cookPieds d’agneau can still be ordered. They need scrubbing, a long blanch, and two or three hours of gentle cooking, and what you get back is a great deal of gelatine. That gelatine is the point of every dish here: it is what makes the sauce cling and the cold version set.
- Paper casesThe brains go into paper cases, crumbed and browned. A paper case was the period’s individual oven dish — cheap, disposable, and it meant each person got their own portion browned on top. A small gratin dish or a ramekin does the same job.
- A border is a wall“Served on a border” appears four times here and means a ring of forcemeat or rice, moulded or piped onto the dish, holding the sauce in the middle. It is a structural element that vanished when plating replaced the platter, and it is why so many of these dishes are described as circles.
- À la pouletteNamed here as if everyone knows it: a white sauce finished with egg yolk and lemon, usually with mushrooms and small onions. It curdles if it boils after the yolk goes in, which is the one piece of timing the book never mentions.
This is the page that shows what the French naming was for. The material is what a butcher could not otherwise sell — ears, tails, feet — and the names attached to it are Persane, Marquise, Ravigote, crémière. A household buying whole carcasses, or keeping its own sheep, had these parts whether it wanted them or not, and the kitchen’s job was to make them appear as a dish rather than as a leftover. The labour went in where the money could not: stuffing an ear is hours of work on something that cost nothing.