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Lamb Cutlets with Spinach
Cut a neck of lamb into cutlets, trim them to a nice shape, brush over with warm butter and season with salt and pepper; put them in a double gridiron and broil in front of a clear fire. Pick the spinach and wash it in a great many waters, as it will be hard to clean without doing so; boil it, and when it is cooked drain it on a hair sieve. Put one ounce of butter and one tablespoonful of flour into a saucepan and stir over the fire until well mixed; pass the spinach through the sieve into the butter, moisten with a small quantity of milk, and stir it over the fire until boiling. Pile the spinach in the center of a hot dish, arrange the cutlets around it, and serve. Epigrammes of Lamb with Asparagus Tops Braise a small piece of breast of lamb, and when it is cooked take it out of the pan and place it between two dishes with a weight on the top and leave until cold. Afterwards cut the lamb into equal-sized pieces, trim them to a cutlet shape and fix a bone in each like a cutlet. Trim an equal number of lambs cutlets and make them into equal pieces, and fry them. Season with salt and pepper and a few drops of lemon juice, dip in well-beaten egg and roll in breadcrumbs, giving a good coating. Place a piece of butter on the frying pan, and when melted place it on the cutlets, and fry until they are a light golden brown on either side, draining well as they are cooked. Arrange the cutlets on a hot dish, put some boiled heads of asparagus in the center, garnish with parsley, and serve.
Two related dishes have run together in this entry: grilled neck cutlets with a spinach purée, and the older restaurant trick of epigrammes, where braised breast is pressed, cut and breaded to imitate cutlets. Both are straightforward once the archaic equipment is translated.
- Neck of lambWhat Oscar calls cutlets are best rendered today by the rack or the neck fillet end — small chops on the bone, about 3/4 inch thick. A butcher will French the bones; two or three per person is a portion.
- Double gridiron, clear fireA hinged wire broiler, set in front of a fire burnt clear of flame and smoke; "clear fire" means a bright, smokeless fire rather than a particular fuel. A ridged cast-iron grill pan over high heat, or a very hot outdoor grill, gives much the same result. Lamb chops want 3-4 minutes a side for pink at the bone.
- Hair sieveA horsehair-mesh drum sieve; the mesh is often said to have been preferred because it did not taint acidic vegetables the way metal could. Any fine nylon sieve, a food mill, or a short pulse in a food processor followed by a sieve will do the work.
- Washing the spinachThe instruction to wash in "a great many waters" is not fussiness. Field spinach carried grit in the crinkles; lift the leaves out of the water each time rather than pouring off, so the sand stays behind.
- The spinach sauceAn ounce of butter to a tablespoon of flour is a small roux — cook it a minute without colouring before the spinach goes in. Roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of raw spinach cooks down to enough purée for four; add milk a spoonful at a time or it slackens past the point where it will hold a pile.
- EpigrammesBreast of lamb is fatty and needs a long braise; the recipe gives neither time nor temperature, but two hours or more in a slow oven suits it. Press it under a weighted plate until cold — easiest overnight in the refrigerator — so it can be cut cleanly. The bone "fixed in" each piece is presentation only.
- A garbled lineThe passage reads as though the breading should follow the frying. It should not: season, dip in egg, crumb, then fry in butter until golden on both sides. The trimmed fresh cutlets in the second dish are breaded and fried the same way, not grilled.
- YieldNeither dish is given a quantity. The epigrammes are conventionally plated alternating one breaded breast piece with one cutlet around the asparagus.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf dining rooms rather than its stoves, and his 1896 book is largely a compilation of the international restaurant repertoire as New York practised it — which is to say French method with English phrasing. Both dishes here are straight from that repertoire. Épigrammes d'agneau is a French conceit generally held to be of some antiquity: the cheap, gelatinous breast is braised, pressed flat, cut into cutlet shapes and crumbed so that it arrives at table looking like the expensive cut it is served beside. The name is generally traced to a joke about a hostess who asked for épigrammes at dinner and was sent a dish of lamb; whether or not that is true, the point of the dish is the visual pun of two different cuts wearing the same shape. The spinach treatment — sieved, bound with a small roux, loosened with milk and piled in the centre of the platter — is a standard nineteenth-century creamed spinach, and the insistence on many changes of washing water is a reminder that greens then came in with the field still on them.