No. 1712

Blanquette of Leg of Lamb

Blanquette de Gigot d'Agneau

Take some cold leg of lamb, suppress from it all the fat and sinews, remove the skin and cut the meat into quarter-inch thick slices; pare them rounded and range the pieces in a sautoir, add to it some veloute sauce (No. 415) finished with a little mushroom liquor-enough to cover the meat-stir in salt, mignonette and leave the stew on the fire for a few moments before serving, but it must not be allowed to boil. Dress the blanquette either in a circle or a straight row, and thicken the sauce with four egg-yolks diluted in a little milk, fresh butter, vinegar or lemon juice; strain the sauce through a tammy and add to it some minced mushrooms, heat without boiling, pour it over the meat and garnish around with bread croutons fried in butter.

← No. 1711 Slices of Leg of Lamb a la Previllot Lamb No. 1713 Lamb or Mutton Steak Plain, Maitre d'Hotel →

For the Modern Kitchen

A leftovers dish dressed up in the French manner: cold roast lamb warmed through in velouté and finished with an egg-yolk liaison. Ranhofer assumes you have a stocked sauce station, so the work is mostly in the sauce.

Never let it boilThe whole dish hinges on this. Once the four yolks go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer or it will scramble and break. Ranhofer says it twice for good reason.
Velouté No. 415A blond roux slackened with veal or chicken stock and simmered until it coats a spoon. Ranhofer specifies only enough to cover the meat. A modern light stock-based velouté made the same way is the direct equivalent; canned gravy is not.
Mushroom liquorThe strained cooking or soaking liquid from mushrooms, used as a seasoning liquid. Simmer sliced button mushrooms in a little water and lemon juice, strain, and use both the liquid here and the minced mushrooms at the end.
MignonetteCoarsely cracked white peppercorns, sometimes with a little coriander. White pepper keeps the sauce from being speckled, which was the point in a blanquette.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow pan, wider than a saucepan and deeper than a skillet. Any wide sauté pan works; you want the lamb in a single layer so it heats evenly and quickly.
TammyA fine worsted cloth used to force sauces through. A fine-mesh conical strainer, or a chinois pressed with a ladle, does the same job.
Reheating cooked lambThe meat is already cooked; it only needs to come up to serving temperature. A few minutes in hot sauce is enough — longer and quarter-inch slices go grey and dry.
YieldThe recipe gives no quantities or yield. Meat from a leftover leg, very roughly 1.5 to 2 lb trimmed, would serve four to six with the croutons and sauce.

A Little History

Blanquette is a white stew, never browned, bound at the last moment with egg yolks and cream or butter and sharpened with lemon or vinegar. Classically it is made from raw veal poached in its own broth, but by the nineteenth century the name had spread to any white ragoût handled the same way, including the reheated-meat versions that gave a professional kitchen something respectable to do with yesterday's roast. Ranhofer, who ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, compiled The Epicurean (1894) as a working reference for exactly that sort of restaurant, where a leg of lamb served hot one day reappeared the next as a garnished entrée. The cross-references to numbered sauces are the tell: the book assumes a brigade with velouté already on the stove, not a home cook starting from nothing.