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Lamb en Casserole
Wipe two slices of lamb cut one and one-fourth inches thick from centre of leg. Put in hot frying-pan, and turn frequently until seared and browned on both sides. Brush over with melted butter, season with salt and pepper, and bake in casserole dish twenty minutes or until tender. Parboil three-fourths cup carrot, cut in strips, fifteen minutes; drain, and sauté in one tablespoon bacon fat to which has been added one tablespoon finely chopped onion. Add to lamb, with one cup potato balls, two cups thin Brown Sauce, three tablespoons Sherry wine, and pepper to taste. Cook until potatoes are soft, then add twelve small onions cooked until soft, then drained and sautéd in two tablespoons butter to which is added one tablespoon sugar. Onions need not be sautéd unless they are desired glazed. Serve from casserole dish.
A leg-of-lamb steak braise built in stages, from the era when "casserole" still named the pot rather than the dish. Nothing here is difficult, but the recipe assumes you have brown sauce already made and a cook's judgement about oven heat.
- The hinge: brown sauce firstThe dish depends entirely on the two cups of thin Brown Sauce, a separate recipe in this book: a browned butter-and-flour roux moistened with brown stock. Make it before you start the lamb, or substitute a good reduced lamb or beef stock lightly thickened; a jarred gravy will flatten the whole thing.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, is a reasonable modern reading, but it is a guess and not the book's. The initial twenty minutes is for the seared steaks alone, with butter and seasoning, before any liquid goes in.
- The vessel"Casserole dish" here means a lidded earthenware or enamelled pot that goes from oven to table. A Dutch oven or any covered flameproof casserole does the same work, and lets you sear in the same pot rather than dirtying a frying-pan.
- Lamb steaksTwo slices cut 1¼ inches thick across the centre of the leg, which will usually take in a section of bone. Ask a butcher for lamb leg steaks; they are not always on display. Twenty minutes plus the later simmering will take them past pink, but leg is lean and will dry if pushed much beyond tender.
- CarrotsFifteen minutes of parboiling is far longer than modern carrots need; cut in strips they want three to five minutes in boiling water before they go into the bacon fat, or they will collapse during the braise.
- Potato ballsCut from raw peeled potatoes with a melon baller or parisienne scoop. They go in raw and cook through in the sauce; peeled small new potatoes are a fair stand-in.
- Small onionsTwelve peeled pearl or boiling onions, boiled separately until tender, then drained and turned in butter with a tablespoon of sugar until glossy. As the text says, the glazing is optional, though the sugar is the only added sweetening.
- SherryThree tablespoons, added with the sauce so the alcohol cooks off. Use a dry or medium sherry, not the sweetened "cooking sherry" sold with added salt.
- YieldTwo thick leg steaks with vegetables serve three or four, and it reheats well since everything is already braised.
The recipe belongs to the American cooking-school tradition, in which middle-class cooking was being reorganised along French lines, and it shows the seams. The method is a plain braise, but the vocabulary is borrowed from the professional kitchen: sauté, parboil, brown sauce, glazed onions, potatoes turned into balls with a scoop. The word casserole is used here in the French sense of a cooking vessel, and the instruction to "serve from casserole dish" keeps the pot on the table. Lamb from the centre of the leg was a comparatively good cut, and dressing it up with sherry and glazed onions is a way of teaching a middling cook to produce something fit for a small dinner.