Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Stewed Breast of Lamb
Stewed Breast of Lamb
Cut a breast of lamb into pieces, season properly with pepper and salt, and stew until tender in enough gravy to cover the meat. Thicken the sauce, pour in one wineglassful of sherry, and serve on a dish of stewed mushrooms.
A terse professional note rather than a recipe in the domestic sense: Oscar assumes a stockpot of brown gravy already on the range and a cook who knows when lamb is done. The gaps are worth filling in.
- Breast of lambThe fatty, bony belly cut below the ribs, sold whole at about 2-3 lb and still cheap where butchers carry it. Ask for it cut across the bones into 2-inch riblets; boneless rolled breast will also work but gives less body to the sauce.
- "Enough gravy to cover"In a hotel kitchen this would most likely have meant brown sauce or espagnole from the sauce station rather than pan drippings. Brown veal or lamb stock, lightly thickened, is the closest domestic equivalent; unsalted stock is safer here since the meat is already seasoned.
- Stewing timeBreast is heavily worked, collagen-rich meat. Expect 1 times hours to 2 hours at a bare simmer; if you prefer to move it to a low oven instead, allow rather longer with the lid on. It is tender when a knife slips between the rib bones without resistance.
- Skim before you thickenThe hinge of the dish. Breast renders a great deal of fat, and if it is not lifted off the surface before the sauce is finished the result is greasy rather than rich. Chilling the stew overnight and lifting the cap is the cleanest method.
- ThickeningA beurre manié (equal butter and flour, kneaded cold, whisked in a little at a time) or a slurry of arrowroot suits a sauce this size. Reduce first if the liquid tastes thin; thickening a weak sauce only makes it pasty.
- One wineglassfulRoughly 2 fl oz, or a quarter cup. Add it after thickening as written and let it simmer a minute or two so the raw alcohol blows off, and use a dry sherry — amontillado or fino — rather than the sweetened cooking sherry sold in supermarkets.
- The mushroom bedStewed mushrooms here means whole or halved buttons cooked gently in butter with a little stock until they give up and reabsorb their liquid, not sautéed to a brown crust. Cook them separately and spoon the lamb over.
- YieldA whole breast serves three, perhaps four with the mushrooms and something starchy alongside. It is a bony cut and looks like more than it is.
Oscar Tschirky was ma tre d'h tel at the Waldorf, presiding over the dining rooms. Breast of lamb is the classic answer to a cheaper cut: long-stewed, sauced with the house espagnole, finished with sherry and set on mushrooms so that it arrives at the table looking like a considered dish rather than a thrift measure. The construction — braise, thicken, fortify with a wineglass of wine at the last moment — is straight French service kitchen practice as it was transplanted to New York hotels in the 1890s.