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The Cook's: Agnello
No. 92. Tenerumi d' Agnello alla Villeroy (Tendons of Lamb) Ingredients: Tendons of lamb, eggs, bread crumbs, truffles, butter, stock, Villeroy sauce.
Slightly cook the tendons (the part of the breast near the ribs) of lamb, press them between two dishes till cold, then cut into a good shape and dip them into a Villeroy sauce (No. 18) egg and breadcrumb, and sautez them in butter. When about to serve, put them in a dish with very good clear gravy. A teaspoonful of chopped mint and a tablespoonful of chopped truffles mixed with the bread crumbs will be a great improvement.
No. 93. Tenerumi d' Agnello alla Veneziana (Tendons of Lamb) Ingredients: Tendons of lamb, butter, parsley, onions, stock.
Fry the tendons of lamb in butter together with a teaspoonful of chopped parsley and an onion. Serve with a good gravy.
No. 94. Costolette d' Agnello alla Costanza (Lamb Cutlets) Ingredients: Lamb cutlets, butter, stock, cocks' combs, fowl's liver, mushrooms.
Fry as many lambs' cutlets as you require very sharply in butter, drain off the butter and replace it with some very good stock or gravy. Make a ragoût of cocks' combs, bits of fowl's liver and mushrooms all cut up; add a white sauce with half a gill of cream mixed with it, and with this mask the cutlets, and sautez them for fifteen minutes.
Three brief Italian lamb dishes written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen, where quantities and cooking times were assumed knowledge. The first two depend entirely on getting the breast tender before it is ever crumbed or fried.
- What "tendons" meansTenerumi are the soft cartilaginous rib tips of the lamb breast, not sinew. Ask a butcher for lamb breast with the rib tips attached, or for the tips alone; they are cheap and rarely displayed.
- "Slightly cook" is misleadingThe cartilage needs to become gelatinous or the finished pieces will be rubbery. Braise the breast in stock at a bare simmer, or at 300F covered, for 1½ to 2 hours until a skewer meets no resistance.
- The pressing stepWeighting the cooled breast between two dishes, refrigerated for several hours, is what makes it firm enough to cut into neat shapes and hold a coating. Do not skip it; warm breast will tear apart in the crumbs.
- Villeroy sauceRecipe No. 18 in this book. It is a thick velouté or allemande, cooled until it sets, used as a coating rather than a pouring sauce. The pieces must be chilled again after dipping so the sauce is solid before the egg and crumbs go on.
- SautezSimply the imperative of sauter -- fry in shallow butter. For the crumbed tendons use clarified butter or a butter and oil mix; whole butter will burn before the crust colours.
- Half a gill of creamIn British imperial measure a gill is a quarter pint, 5 fl oz, so half a gill is about 2½ fl oz, roughly 70 ml (a scant third of a cup).
- Cocks' combsA standard nineteenth-century garnish, blanched, peeled and simmered until translucent. They are hard to find today outside specialist butchers. Chicken livers and mushrooms alone make the ragoût, or add sweetbreads if you want the same soft texture.
- Fifteen minutes of masked cutletsLamb cutlets already fried "very sharply" will be well past pink after a further quarter hour. Treat the final stage as gentle reheating in the sauce, a few minutes at most, and judge by the meat rather than the clock.
- YieldNone is given. Allow two to three lamb cutlets per person, or about 250 g of prepared breast.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) was written by Mrs W. G. Waters, who framed a collection of Italian recipes inside a Boccaccio-style conceit: a party gathered at a villa for a course of cookery spread over ten days. The Italian titles here sit on a firmly French professional technique, which is how grand cooking was done across Europe at the time -- alla Villeroy refers to the thick setting sauce used for coating, traditionally traced to the household of the Villeroy family in seventeenth- or eighteenth-century France, while alla Veneziana and alla Costanza are the sort of loose regional and dedicatory tags that menus of the period attached freely. The dishes are also a reminder of how thoroughly a carcass was used: the rib tips of the breast, cocks' combs and a scrap of fowl's liver were all worth a named recipe in a kitchen that bought whole animals and birds.