No. 1669

Lamb Cutlets, Plain—Yearling

Cotelettes d'Agneau Tardif Nature

Five or six cutlets can be taken from a rack of yearling lamb, four or five from a spring lamb; remove the skin, cut them into any desired thickness, and should the rack be too thin, then cut them off on the bias. Remove and pare the bone from each chop, then beat down to flatten to half an inch in thickness, and trim them all around, removing the skin from each side of the rib bone; scrape about an inch of the end of the bone, clean off the meat and fat to enable it to be decorated with a paper frill; when cooked season with salt, coat over with butter or oil, place on the gridiron all on the same side and broil on a slow but well maintained fire. When cooked on one side, turn over and finish cooking on the other; the entire operation should take about six minutes; trim the handles with paper frills (No. 10), dress and serve with a little clear gravy (No. 404).

← No. 1668 Lamb's Crows, Ravigote Sauce Lamb No. 1670 Lamb Cutlets a la Bussy →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a butchery lesson with a three-minute-a-side cooking method attached. Nearly all the work happens before the meat meets the fire.

The hinge: thickness, not timeThe cutlets are pounded to a uniform half inch, which is why six minutes total is enough. If you leave them thicker, the timing collapses and you will be guessing; pound or cut to half an inch and the two-turn method works as written.
"Tardif" and yearling lambTardif means late-season lamb, roughly a year old, which is why a rack yields five or six chops rather than four or five. Supermarket lamb today is younger and smaller; expect a rack of eight ribs from a 1.5-2 lb rack, and count on three to four cutlets per person as a main course.
The garbled seasoning line"When cooked season with salt, coat over with butter or oil" reads backwards. The sense is: when the cutlets are trimmed and ready, season and oil them, then broil. Salt and fat go on before the fire, not after.
Frenching the boneScraping an inch of rib clean of meat, fat and membrane is what butchers now call frenching. A small sharp knife and a cloth to grip the bone does it; the exposed bone is purely so the paper frill has somewhere to sit.
"A slow but well maintained fire"Not a searing blast. On charcoal this means coals burned down to an even grey with the grate set well above them; on a gas broiler, a moderate setting with the pan a few inches from the element. A fierce fire chars the fat cap before the center is warm.
All on the same sideLaying every cutlet down facing the same way lets you turn the whole row at once, so no chop cooks noticeably longer than its neighbours.
Paper frillsThe frills of No. 10 are decorative cuffs of cut paper, still sold for lamb and poultry. Purely visual, and they go on at the last moment or they wilt in the steam.
The gravyNo. 404 is Ranhofer's clear gravy, called for here unthickened rather than as a buttered pan reduction; a few tablespoons of well-skimmed, seasoned stock gives the effect.
DonenessSix minutes on a moderate fire will take half-inch cutlets to roughly medium; the recipe itself names no degree of doneness. For pink centers, pull them at four to five minutes and rest two.

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 how the book works: every dish is numbered, and the numbers do the talking, sending you off to No. 10 for the paper frills and No. 404 for the gravy rather than repeating anything. Calling the dish nature—plain—places it as the baseline against which the many dressed-up cutlet recipes that follow, such as No. 1670 a la Bussy, are measured. The distinction Ranhofer draws between agneau tardif and spring lamb mattered more in a seasonal market than it does now: spring lamb was small, expensive and briefly available, while the larger yearling carried a fuller flavor and a thicker rack for much of the year. The paper frill, by the 1890s, was largely ornamental; it is often explained as a survival of a service style in which a chop was picked up by its bone at table, though that account is traditional rather than documented.