No. 1692

Lamb Cutlets in Papers

Cotelettes d'Agneau en Papillotes

Lamb cutlets from their peculiar tenderness and delicacy are well adapted to be prepared in papers. Trim eight spring lamb cutlets pared most carefully and keeping them as wide as possible; season and fry in a sautoir with some melted fat pork, turning them over while cooking; let them remain quite rare; remove the cutlets leaving the pork in the pan and to it add finely chopped onions, shallots, mushrooms, and truffles; after these have rendered their moisture take them out and mix in with some chopped parsley, and lean, cooked, and finely shredded ham combined with two spoonfuls of baking forcemeat (No. 81). Divide this preparation into as many parts as there are cutlets and cover each one with a layer of it, cut some sheets of strong paper into heart-shapes, oil over on one-half the right side, pour a little sauce, with a cutlet on top, then a little more of the sauce and fold over the paper; plait the two edges together in such a way as to enclose the meat completely, then lay them on a buttered dish that can stand the heat of the oven, and on which they are to be served; set it in the oven, and when they have acquired a fine color serve; or they may be broiled over a very slow fire in their papers and then dressed on a very hot dish.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a professional brigade, a stocked larder of forcemeats and sauces, and a coal oven. The dish itself is straightforward once you accept that the paper case is a cooking vessel, not a garnish.

The hinge: undercook the first searThe cutlets are meant to leave the pan distinctly rare, because they finish cooking inside the sealed paper. Sear them 30-45 seconds a side in the hot pork fat and no more; a cutlet cooked through in the sautoir will be grey and dry by the time the papillote colours.
Paper and seal"Strong paper" here means a heavy sheet, oiled as the recipe directs; modern kitchen parchment is the usual stand-in. Cut a heart large enough that the folded half clears the cutlet generously, oil the inner face, and crimp the edges in small overlapping pleats so steam cannot escape. Foil will trap steam but will not puff or brown.
Oven heatRanhofer gives no temperature, only "until they have acquired a fine color," which implies a hot oven; something in the region of 425F suits a modern one. Eight to ten minutes on a preheated buttered ovenproof platter is enough for spring lamb cutlets; the paper should balloon and take colour.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow pan, roughly what a modern sauté pan or 10-inch skillet does. Nothing specialised is required.
Melted fat porkRendered fat from fresh or lightly salted pork fatback, cut in dice and melted down. Diced pancetta or fatback works; if using salt pork, blanch it first or the seasoning will run away from you.
Baking forcemeat, No. 81A separate recipe in the book, cross-referenced rather than repeated. Two spoonfuls is a binder, not a filling. A stiff duxelles bound with an egg yolk and a spoonful of soft breadcrumb does the same job.
SpoonfulsRanhofer's "spoonful" is generally a tablespoon, but he is not consistent across the book. Judge the forcemeat by texture: enough to make the chopped mixture cohere as a paste you can spread on the cutlet.
Truffles and the sauceThe truffles are optional in any honest modern reading; canned truffle peelings add little, and extra mushroom does more. The recipe never names the sauce -- in Ranhofer's kitchen it would have been a spoonful of reduced demi-glace or Madeira sauce, thick enough not to soak the paper.
Yield and serviceEight cutlets serves four as a course. Bring them to the table unopened on the same dish they baked on; the scent released when the paper is slit is the point of the preparation.

A Little History

En papillote cooking -- sealing food in oiled paper so it steams in its own aromatics -- was long established in French professional kitchens by the time Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894, and it suited a restaurant like Delmonico's particularly well: the parcel could be assembled in advance, fired to order, and carried to the table still inflated as a piece of theatre. The word papillote originally referred to a twist or curl of paper, the same sense preserved in the frilled paper cuffs put on rib chops. Ranhofer's justification here is technical rather than showy -- spring lamb cutlets are lean and small, and the sealed paper protects them from the fierce dry heat of a coal-fired oven while the duxelles of onion, shallot, mushroom and ham does the seasoning. The recipe sits in a long run of numbered lamb cutlet variations (crepinette before it, string beans after it), which is how the book works: a professional reference in which each entry assumes you have already made the forcemeats and sauces catalogued a thousand numbers earlier.