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Removes or Releves: Cannelon
A Loin of mutton may be dressed in many of the ways suggested for necks; also as- Cannelon de mouton-boned and rolled. À la Polonaise, it is larded, rolled, and braised, and served with stuffed mushrooms.
Carbonade de mouton-boned, larded, and rolled with forcemeat in the centre, braised and glazed; served with a dressed vegetable, Soubise or Piquante sauce, or à la Nivernaisewith stewed carrots. À la Sultane, it has a rich savoury stuffing with raisins or sultanas, and is served in a brown sauce with orange juice and chopped ham.
As Faux Canard, it has a duck stuffing of sage and onions; apple sauce may be served with it.
One cut of meat — a loin of mutton, boned and rolled — renamed and redressed four times. The word at the top of the page is the one worth stopping on.
- A remove is named for what it replacedThe English term records an action: a dish carried in to take the place of one just taken off the table. A relevé is the substantial joint that followed a lighter course, and it was the solid centre of the meal rather than a made dish. That is why this section is all joints and pies and the entrée section is all slices and moulds.
- Cannelon means boned and rolledThis is the single most useful instruction on the page, and a butcher will still carry it out: take the bones out of a loin, roll it, tie it. A boned rolled loin carves into neat rounds, cooks evenly, and takes a stuffing down its length. Everything else here is a variation on that one piece of knife work.
- Faux CanardMock duck: the rolled mutton given a duck’s stuffing of sage and onion, with apple sauce offered alongside, so that it eats like a bird. The book proposes it without comment, which is the interesting part. Dishes imitating other dishes were an ordinary item of the repertoire, not a novelty.
- Forcemeat down the middleRolled with forcemeat in the centre gives each slice a spiral when it is cut, and the forcemeat also keeps the roll from closing up solid. Modern recipes for a stuffed rolled shoulder or loin are doing the same thing, usually without saying why the stuffing is laid in a line rather than packed in a cavity.
- Braised and glazedBraising in a covered pot, then reducing the cooking liquor hard and brushing it back over the meat. The glaze is what gave these joints the lacquered look of the period’s engravings, and it takes ten minutes at the end of a three-hour braise. Hardly anybody does it now, and it is the difference between a brown joint and a handsome one.
- Sweet with savoury, without apologyÀ la Sultane has raisins or sultanas in the stuffing and orange juice and chopped ham in the sauce. Fruit in a meat sauce was unremarkable here and has become faintly suspect in British cooking, which is a loss, because mutton takes it well.
The most revealing dish on the page is the one pretending to be something else. A household serving Faux Canard was producing the shape of a duck dinner — the sage and onion, the apple sauce, the expectations that go with them — out of a joint of mutton, and the book lists it between two genuinely grand preparations as though it were neither a trick nor a confession. Imitation was a respectable kitchen skill. The other thing the page shows is how much work the menu card did: four names, four descriptions, one loin, and a cook who in every case started by taking out the bones.