No. 1689

Lamb Cutlets a la Victor Hugo

Cotelettes d'Agneau a la Victor Hugo

Season the cutlets with salt and pepper, coat them over with oil and broil nicely till done; cover each one with well-buttered and consistent bearnaise sauce (No. 433), into which has been added some grated fresh and very white horseradish, lay on every cutlet a round slice of truffle warmed in a little meal glaze (No. 402) and Madeira wine, dress the cutlets in a circle, pour a little half-glaze sauce (No.413) around the cutlets; trim the handles with a frill (No. 10) and serve.

← No. 1688 Lamb Cutlets a la Turenne Lamb No. 1690 Lamb Cutlets Breaded, Sauted and Broiled →

For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's plate reduced to its essentials: a grilled rib chop, a stiff béarnaise sharpened with horseradish, a truffle slice, and a ribbon of demi-glace. Almost all the work is in the cross-referenced sauces, which Ranhofer assumed his reader had standing by.

The cross-referencesNo. 433 is béarnaise, No. 402 a meat glaze (stock reduced until it sets to a syrup), No. 413 a half-glaze or demi-glace, No. 10 a paper cutlet frill. Any current recipe for béarnaise and demi-glace will serve; the glaze can be replaced by a few spoonfuls of very reduced veal or beef stock.
"Well-buttered and consistent"The béarnaise must be stiff enough to sit on the chop without sliding off — mount it with extra butter and keep the reduction tight. If it is loose it will run into the demi-glace and muddy the plate.
HorseradishFresh grated root rather than the jarred creamed kind, which brings vinegar and dairy that will thin the sauce and dull it. Grate it at the last moment; the heat and aroma fade quickly once cut. Fold it in off the heat - bearnaise will split if it gets too hot.
Lamb cutletsThese are rib chops from a rack, frenched so the bone can take the frill. Figure two to three per person. The recipe says only to broil them "till done"; modern practice is 130-135F at the center for medium-rare, roughly 3 minutes a side on a hot grill for a chop an inch thick.
TrufflePresumably black truffle, sliced thin and warmed - not cooked - in the glaze and Madeira. Preserved truffle from a jar behaves much the same way. If you are substituting, a slice of sauteed mushroom cap gives the visual line but none of the perfume.
Dressing in a circleThe chops are arranged in a ring on a round platter, with the demi-glace poured around them rather than over the meat, so it does not wash the bearnaise off the top.
FrillsPaper cutlet frills are still sold for crown roasts and rack of lamb. They go on after plating, on a bone that has been scraped clean and dry, or they wick up fat and collapse.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire written down — some 3,500 numbered entries, each leaning on the ones around it. Naming dishes for living or recently dead celebrities was standard practice in the grand-restaurant style Ranhofer had learned in France; Victor Hugo died in 1885, at the height of his fame, and dishes bearing his name are said to turn up here and there in French and Franco-American cooking afterwards, though how widely is hard to establish. There is no documented connection between Hugo and this particular combination, and the attribution should be read as homage rather than provenance. What the recipe does record precisely is the logic of a nineteenth-century professional kitchen: it assumes a stock of foundation sauces and preparations already made, so that a dish of this apparent elaboration could be assembled from components rather than built from scratch.