No. 1723

Minion Fillets of Lamb As Venison

Filets Mignons d'Agneau en Chevreuil

Pare six or eight yearling lamb fillets or else those of a young sheep, by suppressing all the fat and skin; cut them up through their length and on the bias, then beat the pieces and trim them into half hearts; lard with fine lardons (No. 1, Fig 52), and lay them in a deep china dish to cover with cooked and cold marinade (No. 114); macerate in this for a few hours, then drain and range them on the bottom of a sautoir into which put half butter and half oil; saute them briskly and when done drain; glaze the surfaces and keep them for a few moments at the oven door. Dress on half heart-shaped bread croutons fried in butter and arranged in a circle on a dish; pouz over a poivrade sauce (No. 522).

← No. 1722 Minion Fillets of Lamb a la Lefort Lamb No. 1724 Minion Fillets of Lamb Cream Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's cross-references make this look harder than it is: the whole point is to marinate lamb loin so it eats like roe deer, then sauce it accordingly. Everything else is knife work and a fast sauté.

What the title means"Minion fillets" is filets mignons, here meaning the trimmed loin or tenderloin of lamb, not beef. En chevreuil means "as roe deer" — the dish is deliberately dressed up as venison.
The hinge: the marinadeNo. 114 is Ranhofer's cooked marinade, a wine-and-vinegar mixture with aromatics, simmered and then cooled completely before it touches the meat, as the recipe specifies. Warm marinade will grey the surface of the lamb; cool it fully and macerate cold — the recipe asks only for a few hours, which is ample for pieces this thin.
LardingThe fine lardons are strips of firm pork back fat drawn through the meat with a larding needle. Back fat is a special-order item now; unsmoked fatback or fresh pork belly fat cut into 1/8-inch batons works, and if you have no needle, draping thin sheets of fat over the fillets during the sauté gives most of the benefit.
SautoirA sautoir is a straight-sided sauté pan, not a casserole. The half-butter, half-oil mixture the recipe calls for is a common period pairing; in modern terms the oil lets the pan run hotter before the butter burns.
TimingFillets beaten thin and trimmed to half-hearts need roughly 1 1/2 to 2 minutes a side over brisk heat, to rare or medium-rare. Cooked through, they lose the point of the marinade and turn dry and grainy.
"Glaze the surfaces"Brush with reduced brown stock (glace de viande) for shine. The "oven door" is simply a warm holding spot, not a cooking heat; the recipe keeps them there only a few moments.
Poivrade sauceNo. 522 is Ranhofer's peppery brown sauce, of the espagnole-with-vinegar-and-mirepoix family. A modern demi-glace finished with cracked black pepper and a vinegar reduction gives much the same effect.
Croutons and yieldCut the bread into half-hearts matching the fillets and fry in butter as directed. Six to eight fillets, each split through their length, will make a ring on one dish; the recipe gives no number of servings. Ranhofer pours the sauce over.

A Little History

The recipe comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York. Serving domestic meat en chevreuil — "as roe deer" — was a standard nineteenth-century French kitchen practice: a cooked vinegar-and-wine marinade, larding with pork fat to replace the leanness of game, and a sharp poivrade sauce together approximated the flavor of venison closely enough to satisfy diners who expected game on a winter menu. It let a kitchen stretch a game course when deer was out of season or unavailable. Ranhofer's book carries several such dishes, including whole legs treated the same way.