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Lamb Stewed with Tomatoes
Divide a saddle of lamb into moderate-sized quarters, remove part of the bones, and put the meat into a flat stewpan with a clove of unpeeled garlic, one onion and a lump of butter; season well and toss over the fire until nicely browned. Cut four tomatoes in halves, take out the seeds and cut them into quarters. Place a little oil in a fryingpan, when hot put the tomatoes in and fry over a sharp fire until the moisture is reduced, then turn them in with the lamb, stir over the fire for ten minutes, take the onion and garlic out, place the lamb and tomatoes on a hot dish, and serve.
Despite the name, nothing here is stewed in the modern sense: this is a quick sauté finished with concentrated tomato, and the whole thing is on the table in half an hour.
- The hinge: keep it fastThe lamb browns, the tomatoes go in, and ten minutes later it is served. Saddle is loin meat and it turns dry and grey if held over the heat any longer, so aim to pull it while still pink inside.
- Saddle of lambThe saddle is the whole double loin, cut across the back, and few butchers break it out untrimmed now. Ask for a boneless lamb loin, or use loin chops with the bone shortened; roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb of meat suits the quantity of tomato given. Do not substitute shoulder, which needs an hour or more of moist cooking.
- "Flat stewpan"A wide, shallow pan, close to what we would now call a sauteuse or braiser. What matters is surface area: the meat must sit in one layer or it steams instead of browning.
- "Sharp fire"High heat. The tomatoes are being fried down to drive off water and concentrate them, not softened, so use a wide skillet and let them catch a little colour.
- Unpeeled garlic and whole onionBoth are aromatics only, added whole so they perfume the butter and are lifted out before serving. A jacketed garlic clove scents the fat without scorching or dispersing into the dish.
- TomatoesFour tomatoes of medium size, perhaps 1 to 1 1/4 lb in all. Off-season supermarket fruit will give a thin result; drained canned whole tomatoes, seeded and quartered, fry down acceptably.
- Seasoning"Season well" here presumably means salt and pepper, and the recipe applies it before browning. Salting the lamb a few minutes ahead helps the surface dry and colour.
- YieldFour servings as a main course. It wants bread, rice or plain potatoes, since the pan holds very little sauce.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection ran to some nine hundred pages and drew heavily on the French repertoire that ruled American hotel kitchens, and this dish is essentially a sauté in the manner the French would label à la provençale: lamb, garlic, oil and tomato cooked hard and fast. The naming is looser than modern usage would allow -- "stewed" was often applied to dishes simply finished in a pan on the stovetop, with little or no liquid. Tomatoes gained ground as respectable American cooking material over the course of the nineteenth century, and the instruction to seed them and fry off the moisture suggests a kitchen wary of a watery, acidic result. The saddle itself signals the Waldorf's market position: it is among the most expensive cuts on the carcass, and spending it on a ten-minute pan dish was the sort of thing a large hotel kitchen could do casually.