No. 1667

Carbonade of Lamb a la Rambuteau

Carbonade d'Agneau a la Rambuteau

Bone entirely, or else remove the aitchbone only, from a loin of lamb; suppress all the fat and sinews, also the skin that covers the sirloin and lard with medium-sized larding pork (No. 3, Fig. 52) and season with salt, pepper and fine herbs; roll the flap over and tie. Line a saucepan with bardes of fat pork, lay the carbonade on top and moisten to its height with mirepoix stock (No. 419); and white wine boil, then simmer in the oven for two and a half to three hours; glaze, untie, dress on a long dish and garnish around with small glazed onions, mushroom heads and potato balls. Strain the stock, free it of fat and reduce it with as much veloute (No. 415), thicken with raw egg-yolks, fresh butter and lemon juice; strain it once more through a tammy, and use part of it to cover the garnishings, sending the remainder to the table separately.

← No. 1666 Carbonade of Lamb a la Jardiniere Lamb No. 1668 Lamb's Crows, Ravigote Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stocks and sauces already standing on the range, so most of the work here is assembling components the original assumes you have. The hinge is the finish: once the egg yolks go into the reduced sauce it must never come back to a boil.

The cutA whole loin of lamb, boned, trimmed of fat and sinew, then rolled and tied, is a large rolled loin roast; the recipe also allows the lighter option of removing the aitchbone only. A boned and rolled loin of this kind will serve roughly six to eight, and a butcher will bone and roll it for you if asked.
Larding and bardes"Medium-sized larding pork" means strips of firm back fat threaded through the meat with a larding needle; "bardes" are thin sheets of the same fat used to line the pan. Sliced fatback or unsmoked pork belly does both jobs, and thick-cut unsmoked bacon is an acceptable substitute for the lining if you accept a faintly cured flavour.
Mirepoix stockRanhofer's No. 419 is, in the usual sense of the term, a stock cooked with diced carrot, onion, celery, ham or bacon trimmings, thyme and bay. A good brown veal or lamb stock simmered with those vegetables gives much the same thing. The meat is moistened "to its height", so the liquid comes up level with the joint rather than covering it, and it is then boiled up and finished slowly in the oven.
Oven heat"Simmer in the oven" means a bare tremble rather than a rolling braise; a modern oven at around 300-325F will hold that over the stated two and a half to three hours. Modern lamb loin will be well past pink at that point, which is what a carbonade intends; if you prefer it rosy, expect to sacrifice the slow-braised texture the dish is built on.
GlazingTo glaze, uncover the meat toward the end and baste it repeatedly with the reducing liquid until it takes on a shining coat. The onions and potato balls are glazed the same way, in butter with a little stock and sugar, until coated.
Velouté and the liaisonVelouté (No. 415) is a white roux-based sauce made with veal or chicken stock. Reduce the strained, degreased braising liquid with an equal volume of it, then take the pan off the heat before whisking in the yolks with butter and lemon juice. Above roughly 180F the yolks scramble and the sauce breaks.
TammyA tammy was a worsted cloth through which sauce was wrung by two cooks twisting opposite ends. A fine chinois pressed with a ladle, or a fine sieve lined with damp muslin, gives the same smoothness.
ServingThe roast is untied and dressed on a long platter, the garnish banked around it and masked with part of the sauce, the rest passed in a sauceboat. Potato balls means potatoes cut with a parisienne scoop and cooked in butter.

A Little History

A carbonade originally meant meat grilled over coals, from Italian carbonata, but by the nineteenth century French kitchens had stretched the word to cover a rolled, larded and braised joint like this one, and it survives in yet another sense in the Flemish beer stew carbonnade flamande. The garnish name honours Claude-Philibert Barthelot, comte de Rambuteau, prefect of the Seine in the 1830s and 1840s, whose name was attached to dishes in the same decorative way as Soubise; Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York and author of The Epicurean (1894), inherited this vocabulary wholesale from the Parisian kitchens he trained in and reproduced it for a New York clientele that expected French labels on the menu. The recipe is a fair picture of what that expectation cost: a boned loin, a mirepoix stock, a velout hree separate glazed garnishes, all cross-referenced by number to other pages, because a book of this kind was written less for a household cook than for a professional working inside a system.