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Minced Lamb with Poached Eggs
Take some cold roasted lamb, trim and chop it very fine, season with pepper, salt and a little finely chopped mint. Make some gravy very hot in a saucepan, thicken it with browned flour, stir in the seasoned meat, and let it get hot. Make some triangles of buttered toast, lay a poached egg on each, pour the mince into a flat dish, and garnish with the toast and poached eggs.
A leftovers dish that depends almost entirely on the quality of the gravy, since nothing else here is cooked twice. Read it as a rough method rather than a formula: Oscar gives no quantities at all.
- Quantities, inferredFigure about 1 lb of cold lamb, 1 to 1½ cups of gravy, four eggs and four to eight toast points to serve four. The mince should be moist and just holding together, not soupy.
- "Browned flour"Flour toasted dry in a pan, or in a moderate oven, until it smells nutty and turns the colour of sand; the recipe gives no temperature. Browned flour is called for in a number of period books and was sometimes prepared in quantity and stored. It thickens less than raw flour, so allow roughly half again as much, or simply use a brown roux.
- The gravy is the dishIf you have no roasting juices left, reduce good lamb or beef stock rather than making a pan gravy from nothing. A weak, floury gravy is the usual failure here.
- Chop, do not grind"Chop it very fine" means knife-cut to a coarse hash. A food processor turns cooked lamb to paste and the texture never recovers.
- Reheating cooked lambBring the mince to a full simmer and hold it there a minute or two, then serve. Long stewing in gravy dries the meat out further, since it is already fully cooked.
- MintA teaspoon or so of finely chopped fresh mint, stirred in at the end rather than simmered, keeps its flavour. Dried mint is a poor substitute in a dish this plain.
- Poached eggs, timedThree minutes in barely trembling water gives a set white and a liquid yolk, which is the point: the yolk becomes part of the sauce. Poach them last, or hold them in warm water and drain on a towel before plating.
- AssemblyWarm the serving dish. Toast goes on at the last moment or it softens under the mince.
Minced meat under a poached egg was common hotel and club cookery on both sides of the Atlantic around 1900, closely related to the hash on the American breakfast menu and to the English "mince on toast." Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf, contains a number of these frugal turns, in which cold roast meat reappears chopped, sauced and dressed up with an egg. The mint is the English signature -- mint with lamb is generally traced to the long-standing British pairing of mint sauce with roast lamb, which Oscar carries over into the reheated version. The poached egg served a similar purpose elsewhere on menus of the period: it made a made-over dish look composed and deliberate rather than like yesterday's joint.