No. 1683

Lamb Cutlets a la Perigueux

Cotelettes d'Agneau a la Perigueux

Prepare one pound of chopped forcemeat (No. 65), season highly and add four ounces of finely chopped truffles. Pare twelve lamb cutlets, keeping the end bones quite short and only leaving the kernel meat on; beat them down thin, then lay in a sautoir with hot butter, simply to stiffen the meat, remove at once on a baking sheet; cover with a buttered paper and let get partially cold under the pressure of a weight, or in the press (Fig. 71), afterward covering both sides of the meat with a layer of the above forcemeat; enclose them separately in square pieces of pork "crepinette" or kall fat, broil nicely over a slow fire and dress on a very hot dish, pouring a little clear gravy (No. 404) into the bottom of it. Serve with a sauce-boat of Perigueux sauce (No. 517), to which is mixed some pearl chicken forcemeat quenelles (No. 154).

← No. 1682 Lamb Cutlets a la Nubian Lamb No. 1684 Lamb Cutlets a la Pompadour →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with a larder of numbered preparations behind it. Stripped of the cross-references, this is a stuffed, caul-wrapped lamb chop grilled gently so the forcemeat sets without the fat outside burning.

The hinge: a slow fireCaul fat and a raw forcemeat coating need low, steady heat — the fat has to render and the stuffing cook through before the surface colours. A hot grill scorches the caul and leaves the forcemeat raw. Indirect heat is closer to what he means by "a slow fire."
Kall fat and crepinette"Kall" is Ranhofer's spelling of caul — the lacy fat membrane from a pig's abdomen. Order it from a butcher, soak it in cool water to unfurl it, and pat dry. It largely renders away in cooking, leaving the forcemeat sealed to the meat.
Forcemeat No. 65A modern equivalent: 1 lb lean lamb or veal blitzed with an egg white and about 1/2 cup cream, seasoned hard, kept ice-cold throughout. Four ounces of chopped truffle is a very large quantity by present prices; a mix of truffle peelings and finely chopped mushroom duxelles reads similarly.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow pan, not a sauté pan with sloping sides. The butter is used only to stiffen the surface of the meat — thirty seconds a side, no colour.
Pressing the cutletsFig. 71 is the press Ranhofer illustrates; a sheet pan with a weight on top does the same job. Chilling under pressure flattens the cutlets to an even thickness so the forcemeat layer sits flush and cooks evenly.
Paring the bone"Keeping the end bones quite short and only leaving the kernel meat" means french the rib bone clean and trim off the tail of the chop, leaving just the eye. Ask for a rack of lamb frenched and cut it yourself.
Périgueux sauce and the gravyNo. 517 is demi-glace with Madeira and chopped truffle; a good reduced veal stock with Madeira and truffle will stand in. No. 404 is a clear unthickened gravy — a few spoonfuls of hot lamb or veal jus in the base of the platter, not a pool of sauce.
Pearl quenellesThe forcemeat piped or scooped into pea-sized dumplings and poached in barely trembling stock for two or three minutes. Boiling breaks them. The recipe calls for chicken forcemeat (No. 154) for these; add them to the sauce at the last moment.
YieldTwelve cutlets serves six at two apiece. The garnish and sauce are rich enough that two per person is generous.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows how completely the restaurant's kitchen ran on French classical practice. À la Périgueux points to Périgord in southwestern France, the country most associated with the black truffle, and in nineteenth-century menu language the name signals a truffled demi-glace and usually truffle somewhere in the garnish as well — here twice over, in the sauce and in the forcemeat. The technique of wrapping a chop in caul and grilling it is older and humbler than the truffle; caul-wrapped forcemeat parcels were a standard way of keeping delicate meat moist over coals long before they were dressed up for a Fifth Avenue dining room. The elaborate numbering — forcemeat 65, gravy 404, sauce 517, quenelles 154 — reflects a brigade system in which several cooks prepared components independently, and it is the reason recipes like this read as shorthand rather than as instructions for a single person working alone.