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Fillets of Lamb, Cherry Sauce
For the fillets use either the fillet from the loin or the top of a "best end of a loin" boned. Cut the meat in slices or rounds, and sauté in hot butter in the blazer. Season with salt and pepper and pour into the blazer half a cup of maraschino cherries with half a cup of the liquid from the bottle. Candied cherries that have stood half an hour in half a cup of boiling water, on the back of the range, and then mixed with half a cup of
A chafing-dish dish meant to be cooked at the table in a few minutes. The printed text breaks off mid-sentence in the candied-cherry variation, so the final quantity is lost; the maraschino version above it is complete and workable.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame; the hot-water pan beneath it gives gentler, indirect heat and was used both for holding and for delicate mixtures. Any wide, heavy skillet stands in for it, but the point of the recipe is fast cooking in front of the guests.
- The cut"Fillet from the loin" is the lamb tenderloin, a slim muscle of only a few ounces. "Best end of a loin" boned means the rib end of the loin boned out to a loin eye, close to what is sold today as a lamb loin or rack fillet. Either gives neat rounds.
- Cooking timeSlices this thin need roughly 90 seconds a side in foaming butter, to about 130-135F for medium-rare. Lamb loin held longer turns grey and dry, and the sugary cherry liquid will scorch if the pan sits too long over the flame.
- Maraschino cherriesAt the turn of the century maraschino cherries were commonly marasca cherries preserved in maraschino liqueur, so the half cup of "liquid from the bottle" could carry real alcohol and bitter-almond character; cheaper imitations, bleached, dyed and sugared, were already on sale in America by then. Modern supermarket maraschinos are brined, bleached, sugared and dyed, and their syrup is simply sweet. A jar of amarena or similar cherries in syrup is nearer the original.
- The candied-cherry versionThe fragment describes soaking candied cherries in half a cup of boiling water at the cooler back of the range to soften and loosen them, then mixing them with half a cup of something the text breaks off before naming. The quantity survives; the ingredient does not, so treat it as unrecoverable rather than guessing.
- Balancing the sauceHalf a cup of cherry syrup poured onto a buttery pan is very sweet on its own. A spoonful of the pan juices scraped up with a splash of dry sherry or red wine, and a final seasoning of salt, brings it back into range as a savoury sauce.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of meat, so the yield can only be estimated; a chafing-dish course of this kind would suit two or three at supper.
Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in American households around 1900, when the small spirit lamp let a hostess cook in the drawing room or after the theatre without troubling the kitchen. The books of the period, this one included, are full of quick sautés, creamed shellfish and rarebits -- dishes that finish in under ten minutes and look like a performance. Sweet fruit sauces with lamb and mutton have a much longer pedigree in English cooking, where currant jelly was the standard accompaniment; cherries here do the same job in a more fashionable dress. Maraschino at this date still meant the clear cherry liqueur of the Dalmatian coast, generally traced to Zara, and cherries bottled in it were an imported delicacy rather than the dyed cocktail garnish the name later came to mean in the United States.