No. 1615

Fillets of Mutton Larded, with Greek Ravioles—Whole

Filets de Mouton Entiers Piques aux Ravioles a la Grecque

Raise, pare, and remove the sinews from some mutton fillets; lard them with fine larding pork (No. 3, Fig. 52) and roast them in a hot oven; when done, dress on a garnishing of Greek ravioles.

Greek Ravioles.—Chop fine and pound one pound of fillet or loin of mutton, add to this a sheep's brain, cooked, well drained, and pounded, and two ounces of rice previously boiled in water; season with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and add one ounce of chopped onions fried in butter, some chopped parsley, a little bechamel (No. 409) half an ounce of fresh butter, and four raw egg-yolks; taste this forcemeat, to see whether the seasoning be correct, then use it to make square ravioles as described in No. 158, when poached and drained, place them in some clear gravy (No. 404) to simmer for a few moments until it is absorbed, bestrewing the ravioles with grated cheese; pour over a thin tomato puree (No. 730) serving a clear gravy (No. 404) separately.

← No. 1614 Slices of Fillet of Mutton, Maitre-d'Hotel Mutton No. 1616 Mutton Kidneys a la Burtel →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer's method is straightforward hotel cookery, but the ravioli filling is built on an ingredient that is now restricted or prohibited in most of the world, and the recipe cannot be followed as printed.

Sheep's brain is specified risk materialOvine and caprine skull including brain, and spinal cord, are classed as specified risk material under EU and UK TSE controls for animals above the relevant age and may not be sold for food; scrapie, the sheep transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, concentrates in exactly this tissue. There is no home preparation that addresses a prion, since the infectious agent survives ordinary cooking and drying.
Why this matters here and not elsewhereThe brain is not a garnish in this recipe; it is one of the bulk ingredients of the forcemeat alongside the pounded mutton and rice, and contributes much of its texture. Omitting it does not leave you with Ranhofer's dish, so a current recipe for a meat-filled ravioli should be used instead.
The cross-referencesThe numbers point elsewhere in The Epicurean: No. 3 and Fig. 52 give the cutting of larding pork, No. 158 the making and poaching of square ravioles, No. 409 bechamel, No. 404 a clear reduced gravy, No. 730 tomato puree. The recipe is unusable without all five, which is typical of the book's structure.
"Fillets" of muttonRanhofer means the loin fillet raised whole from the saddle, not the small tenderloin a butcher sells today, and "raise" means to lift it off the bone yourself. Mutton in 1894 meant a sheep well over a year old, far stronger in flavour and firmer than modern lamb.
Larding porkFine larding pork is back fat cut into long thin strips and drawn through the meat with a larding needle, a technique that compensated for lean, dry roasting joints. Neither the needle nor unsalted fresh back fat is a supermarket item, though a butcher will usually cut fatback to order.
The finishing stepThe poached ravioli are simmered in clear gravy until it is absorbed, then strewn with grated cheese and masked with a thin tomato puree, with more clear gravy served separately. The absorption step is the part of the method worth borrowing for any filled pasta.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole repertoire of a grand American restaurant working in the French manner. The label "a la grecque" here is doing the loose nineteenth-century job of signalling an eastern Mediterranean flavour rather than any documented Greek original: rice, brain and mutton bound with egg yolk in a wrapper resemble the family of stuffed and rice-bound dishes found across Greece, Turkey and the Levant, and Ranhofer's kitchen would have absorbed the idea through the French classical canon rather than from a Greek cook. Brain and other offal were ordinary luxury ingredients on such menus, prized for their softness and their ability to enrich a forcemeat, and their disappearance from Western restaurant cooking is often attributed, at least in part, to the BSE and scrapie regulations of the late twentieth century, though changing taste plainly played its part too. The recipe also shows how a grand kitchen worked in layers: the roast is the centrepiece, but four separate preparations from elsewhere in the book have to exist before the garnish can be assembled.