No. 1685

Lamb Cutlets a la Robinson Cotelettes d'Agneau a la Robinson)

Season eight fine cutlets with salt and pepper, then fry them in butter. Apart from this cut up some chicken livers into three-eighths of an inch squares, cook them briskly in butter for a few minutes, and dress the chops in a circle, garnish the handles with frills (No. 10) and lay the drained livers in the center; pour over a Madeira half-glaze sauce (No. 413) with fine herbs.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A quick sauté dressed as a set piece: eight rib chops in a ring, a mound of diced chicken liver in the middle, Madeira sauce over. The work is in the sauce and the timing, not the technique.

What a cutlet isRanhofer's côtelette is a rib chop, frenched so the bone is scraped clean for the paper frill. Eight small lamb rib chops would make a course for about four.
Madeira half-glazeNo. 413 is the book's Madeira sauce, built on a demi-glace (reduced brown stock and espagnole) finished with the wine. A modern equivalent is good veal or beef stock reduced hard to a coating consistency, deglazed with a dry Madeira such as Sercial or Verdelho and mounted with butter; a sweet Madeira will push the dish toward sugariness.
Fine herbsFines herbes means chopped parsley, chervil, tarragon and chives, added off the heat at the last moment so they stay green and aromatic.
The liversThree-eighths of an inch is a small dice, about 1 cm. Sear them hard in hot butter in a single layer for two to three minutes; crowded or held over the heat they weep and turn grainy. Cook them through rather than leaving them pink — poultry liver is the one component here worth taking to well done.
Cooking the chopsRib chops an inch thick take roughly three minutes a side in foaming butter for 130–135°F internal, medium rare. Season and let them rest while the livers cook, then build the plate; the sauce should be ready before either goes in the pan.
FrillsNo. 10 refers to the paper cuffs slipped over the trimmed bone ends. Purely decorative, entirely optional, and still sold as cutlet frills or chop papers.
AssemblyWarm the platter. The chops stand bone-outward in a ring, meat overlapping slightly, livers drained of butter and heaped in the middle, sauce poured over the meat rather than the garnish so the liver stays crisp at the edges.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-four years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is organized as a professional reference: numbered recipes that cross-refer to sauces, garnishes and even paper frills held elsewhere in the book, on the assumption that a kitchen brigade already has demi-glace on the stove. Names like "à la Robinson" belong to the nineteenth-century restaurant habit of dedicating a preparation to a patron, a colleague or a public figure; the Robinson in question is not identified, and many such attributions in the book appear to be untraceable today. What distinguishes the dish is the chicken-liver garnish, a thrifty offal treated as a luxury filling for the center of the ring, like the pâtés of the period. The circular arrangement of frilled cutlets around a mound was meant to be carried in whole and portioned at the table.