No. 1721

Minion Fillets of Lamb a la Landgrave

Filets Mignons d'Agneau a la Landgrave

Remove all the sinews from one or more minion fillets; season with salt, sweet oil, and lemon juice, then fry them in butter, and dress on slices of bread cut one and a quarter inches across by five inches long. Pour over a veloute sauce (No. 415) or allemande sauce (No. 407), having it well buttered and seasoned with Worcestershire sauce, and either mignonette or cayenne pepper.

← No. 1720 Minion Fillets of Lamb a la Benoist Lamb No. 1722 Minion Fillets of Lamb a la Lefort →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you have a saddle of lamb broken down on the bench and a stockpot of velouté already going. The dish is essentially seared lamb tenderloin on a fried bread plank, and the whole thing lives or dies on not overcooking two ounces of meat.

What a minion fillet isThe filet mignon of lamb is the small tenderloin strip lying under the loin of a saddle, only a couple of ounces apiece. It is not generally sold under that name; ask a butcher for the tenderloins from a saddle of lamb, or substitute medallions cut from a boned loin. The recipe says only 'one or more' and gives no allowance per person.
Sweet oilPlain olive oil, the mild kind, not a peppery finishing oil. Salt, oil and lemon here are a brief marinade of a few minutes, not an overnight cure; lemon on a piece of meat this small will begin to firm the surface if left long.
Cooking timeThe recipe gives no time. A trimmed lamb tenderloin in hot butter wants roughly 90 seconds to two minutes a side and a few minutes' rest; taken past pink it turns dry and grey, and there is not enough fat in the cut to forgive it.
The breadThe recipe calls for slices cut about 1¼ inches across by 5 inches long, i.e. a long narrow plank per fillet, not a round. It does not actually say to fry them, though croutons of this kind are usually fried in butter until crisp and drained; a soft untoasted slice collapses under the sauce.
Velouté or allemandeVelouté is a white stock thickened with white roux; allemande is velouté finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison. Once the yolks go in, the sauce must not boil or it will break, so add the Worcestershire, pepper and finishing butter off the heat.
Mignonette pepperCoarsely cracked white peppercorns, sometimes a black-and-white mixture, sieved of dust. Crack it yourself in a mortar; pre-ground pepper gives none of the intended texture on the sauce.
Worcestershire in a French sauceA restrained hand; the recipe gives no quantity, but a teaspoon or so in a cup of finished sauce is enough. More and it reads as gravy rather than a velouté.
ServingThe original gives no yield; it says only 'one or more' fillets, so the number served depends on how many a saddle produces. It needs to go out immediately, as the crisp bread softens within a minute or two of being sauced.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of his years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and it reads like a working chef's index rather than a book for home cooks: cross-references to numbered sauces, no yields, no times. This entry sits in a run of closely related preparations, numbers 1720 through 1722, each labelled with a name, a la Benoist, a la Landgrave, a la Lefort, in the nineteenth-century restaurant convention where the title told a trained cook the whole composition at a glance. Landgrave is a German princely title, and such names are generally understood to have been attached to dishes for grandeur and association rather than to record an origin.