No. 1673

Lamb Cutlets a la Clemence

Cotelettes d'Agneau a la Clemency

Have ten well-pared fine cutlets seasoned with salt and pepper; sauté them in butter, dress crown-shaped and fill the inside with a ragout made as follows: To a veloute sauce (No. 415) add some meat glaze, (No. 402) good Madeira wine and lemon juice, also escalops of lamb's sweetbreads fried in butter with minced mushrooms. Between each cutlet lay a round slice of salted, unsmoked red beef tongue cut three-sixteenths of an inch in thickness and one inch and a half in diameter; garnish around with fine Julienne potatoes (No. 2792); trim the cutlet handles with frills, and serve very hot.

← No. 1672 Lamb Cutlets a la Charleroi Lamb No. 1674 Lamb Cutlets a la Durand →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade that already has velouté, glaze and blanched sweetbreads standing by, so most of the work here is assembling components he assumes exist. Read it as a plating scheme with a garnish sauce attached.

The cutlets themselves"Well-pared" points to lamb rib chops with the bone scraped clean, what we would now call French-trimmed. Ranhofer gives no thickness or degree of doneness; cut them about three-quarters of an inch thick and sauté a few minutes a side in butter, keeping them pink, since thin lamb rib meat turns grey and dry if held longer.
Velouté, in his numberingThe recipe points to his No. 415, a white stock (veal or chicken) thickened with a pale butter-flour roux; the exact finish is his own and worth looking up rather than assuming. Roughly a cup of well-made velouté will carry ten cutlets.
Meat glazeNo. 402 is stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold; a spoonful adds colour and depth. Reduced veal stock or a demi-glace concentrate stands in, and commercial concentrates in particular should be used sparingly, as they are very salty.
Lamb sweetbreadsSold as lamb throat or heart sweetbreads at a real butcher, and increasingly by mail order. They must be soaked in several changes of cold water, blanched, pressed and peeled before they are sliced into escalops and fried — Ranhofer takes all of that for granted.
Salted, unsmoked red beef tongueThis is corned or pickled tongue, cooked and cooled, not smoked tongue and not pastrami-cured. Buy it cooked from a deli and cut discs a scant 5 mm thick (his three-sixteenths of an inch) and 1.5 inches across with a cutter; the slices are decorative, so they need to be even.
Crown-shapedStand the cutlets bone up, leaning against each other in a ring on the platter, with a tongue round between each pair. The ragout goes in the well at the centre, spooned in at the last moment so it does not soak the meat.
Julienne potatoesHis No. 2792 is matchstick potatoes deep-fried crisp. Fry them just before serving and salt them off the heat; they collapse within minutes of meeting sauce, so pile them outside the crown.
FrillsPaper cutlet frills are still sold for crown roasts. They are purely ornamental and should go on after the chops are arranged, or they scorch and stain with fat.
YieldTen cutlets serves four as a main course, five if the sweetbread ragout and potatoes are generous.

A Little History

The recipe comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the vast codification of what he cooked over three decades at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the house style exactly: a plain sauté of good meat surrounded by a small architecture of garnishes, each cross-referenced to a numbered preparation elsewhere in the book. Dishes named "à la" plus a woman's first name are often said to have marked a composed garnish, perhaps honouring a patron or simply borrowed from an earlier chef's repertoire, and no particular Clémence has been documented behind this one. The pairing of sweetbreads with pickled red tongue is worth noting for what it says about the period's taste for colour on the plate — pink discs against white sauce and browned cutlets. The crown arrangement with paper frills, a presentation traditionally associated with rib cutlets, survives today mainly in the crown roast of lamb.