No. 1611

Noisettes of Mutton, Provencal Style

Noisettes de Mouton a la Provencale

Select large mutton fillets; remove the fat and skin, then cut them up on the bias into four-ounce slices; flatten and pare them round-shaped (after they are pared they should weigh three ounces each), then salt over. Chop up the parings very finely, have an equal quantity of salt pork and cut-up ham, each chopped separately and mixed after, and a handful of soaked and pressed bread-crumbs; season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg. With this preparation make some small cakes the same size as the noisettes; dip them in beaten eggs and roll in fine bread-crumbs; fry them in butter the same time as the noisettes, drain, dry and lay the noisettes on top of the forcemeat cakes; glaze them over and pour some Provencal sauce (No. 529) around and serve.

← No. 1610 Noisettes of Mutton, Glazed Mutton No. 1612 Noisettes of Mutton with Cooked Fine Herbs →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a butcher's counter and a stocked garde-manger; the method itself is straightforward once you translate the parts.

What a noisette isHere it means a round, trimmed medallion cut on the bias from the loin fillet, not the eye of a rib chop. Boneless loin of lamb or mutton works; a butcher will cut and trim it for you if you ask for four-ounce slices pared to three.
Mutton versus lambTrue mutton is sheep over about two years old, still sold at halal and some specialty butchers. Boneless lamb loin substitutes directly, cooks faster, and tastes considerably milder.
The forcemeat cakes are the pointThe trimmings, salt pork and ham are chopped separately and only then combined; the recipe does not say why, though the three have quite different textures under the knife. The soaked, pressed bread is the binder. Chop by hand or pulse briefly in a food processor, since over-processing turns the mixture pasty and it will not hold a cake shape.
"Soaked and pressed bread-crumbs"This is a panade: stale crumb soaked in milk or stock, then squeezed nearly dry. Dry packaged crumbs will not work in the forcemeat, though they are correct for the outer breading.
Cooking times are not equalCooking times -- the instruction to fry the cakes and the noisettes 'the same time' probably follows from the deliberate size match rather than from any doneness target. Cook the cakes through, roughly 4 minutes a side in clarified butter; give the medallions 2 to 3 minutes a side for medium-rare, 130-135F internal, and rest them.
GlazingTo glaze here means brushing with reduced meat glaze (glace de viande) for shine, not adding sugar. A few spoons of heavily reduced stock does it.
Provencal sauceNo. 529 is Ranhofer's own Provencal sauce; in nineteenth-century professional usage the name points to tomato and garlic. Any good tomato-garlic sauce finished with a little butter serves the same purpose.
YieldThe recipe gives none. Figure two three-ounce noisettes and two cakes per person; a boneless lamb loin might yield six to eight medallions, so three or four servings from one loin plus its trimmings.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the logic of that kitchen plainly: nothing is wasted, and the trimmings from the fillet become the base on which the fillet is served. The "Provencal" tag in nineteenth-century French professional cooking signals tomato and garlic, the two markers Parisian kitchens associated with the south, and it appears throughout Ranhofer's book as one of a fixed vocabulary of garnitures. Mutton, now a rarity on American menus, was ordinary restaurant meat then, and Ranhofer devotes a long section to it.