No. 1656

Mutton Tendons with Mushrooms

Tendrons de Mouton aux Champignons

Cut the tendons from the end of the breast; braise, then lay them under a weight, and when cold cut them up into escalops, and dip in Villeroi sauce (No. 560), fry in clarified butter; dress crown-shaped with stewed mushrooms and cream in the middle.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you know what a tendron is and that Villeroi sauce is standing ready; neither is true in most kitchens now. The hinge is the pressing — without a long cold rest under weight the braised cartilage will not slice into clean escalops or hold a coating.

What the tendons areTendrons are the soft cartilage tips of the ribs at the thin end of the breast, not sinew. Ask a butcher for lamb or mutton breast (riblets) with the cartilage strip intact; a whole breast of 2-3 lb yields enough for four.
Mutton versus lambMutton means sheep over about two years old, strongly flavoured and much tougher. Almost all lamb breast sold today is under a year, so it will braise tender in appreciably less time and taste milder.
BraisingThe cartilage must go fully gelatinous or it stays rubbery. Ranhofer gives neither time nor temperature; reckon on roughly 2 to 2 1/2 hours at a bare simmer in stock, covered, which a low oven of about 300F will hold. Test by pushing a skewer through the cartilage, not the meat.
PressingLift the tendons out hot, lay them flat between two trays with 3-4 lb of weight on top, and refrigerate overnight. They set into a firm slab that cuts cleanly; pressing warm and slicing the same hour will give you ragged pieces.
Villeroi sauceSauce Villeroi is classically a reduced allemande — veloute enriched with egg yolk and cream — boiled down until it coats a spoon heavily, then cooled until nearly solid; Ranhofer's No. 560 should be consulted for his own version. The escalops are dipped in the cold sauce and chilled again so the coat sets, and are usually egged and breadcrumbed before frying.
Clarified butterClarified butter is specified because the milk solids in whole butter scorch well before the coating colours. Ghee will do much the same job, though it is nuttier; a neutral oil with a little butter added is a common substitute.
Stewed mushrooms and creamCook sliced mushrooms in butter until their liquid has gone, then add cream and reduce until it clings. Wet mushrooms will flood the centre of the crown and soften the fried coating within minutes.
ServingDress the escalops overlapping in a ring on a warm platter with the mushrooms heaped in the middle, and send it out immediately. Four as a course, and the whole dish is best organised over two days — braise and press on the first, coat and fry on the second.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer put this in The Epicurean (1894) among a long run of mutton entries, sitting beside sheep's tails and sheep's tongues, a reminder of just how completely a nineteenth-century professional kitchen expected to use an animal. Tendrons were prized precisely because the rib cartilage turns to gelatine under long braising and then sets firm when cold, giving a cook something sliceable and coatable out of a cut that would otherwise be scrap. The Villeroi treatment — masking cold cooked meat in a stiff, egg-enriched velouté, crumbing it and frying — is a classic French device for turning leftovers or humble cuts into something that could be crowned on a platter at Delmonico's, where Ranhofer was chef. Mutton itself was ordinary meat in American cities then and has since all but vanished from the market, which is the main reason the dish reads as exotic now.