No. 1727

Minion Fillets of Lamb with Shallot Sauce and Marrow, Roasted and Larded

Filets Mignons Piques et Rotis a la Sauce Echalote et Moelle

Lift some minion fillets and suppress from them all the fat and sinews, then lard them with very fine lardons (No. 3, Fig. 52), lay them in a baking pan, salt over and baste with drippings, then roast them in a very hot oven. Eight or ten minutes should suffice to have them done properly, dress on oblong slices of toast and cover with some clear gravy (No. 404) and serve separately a shallot sauce with marrow.

Shallot Sauce with Marrow.—Place in a saucepan one ounce of butter with two shallots, cut in one-eighth of an inch squares as much meat glaze (No. 402) as butter, salt, pepper, lemon juice and chopped parsley, place on the fire for two minutes, then add some marrow, cut in quarter inch squares and previously blanched by dipping in boiling water.

← No. 1726 Minion Fillets of Lamb Printaniere Lamb No. 1728 Minion Fillets of Lamb with Truffles-Sauted →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer is writing for a brigade that had stock, glaze and larding needles on hand. Translated into a home kitchen this is a very fast roast of lamb tenderloin with a warm shallot-butter and marrow garnish.

What a minion fillet isThe filet mignon of lamb is the small tenderloin lying under the saddle, only a couple of ounces apiece and a few inches long. Each saddle carries two, so two saddles yield four; a butcher can also supply them trimmed. Boned loin cut into short lengths is a common substitute.
Larding is optional nowLardons drawn through the meat with a needle helped keep lean cuts from drying in a fierce oven. If you would rather not lard, bard the fillets instead with a thin sheet of fatback tied on.
"A very hot oven"Ranhofer gives no temperatures; this is conventionally read as something in the region of 450-475F. His eight to ten minutes assumes that sort of heat and a cold larded fillet; check with a thermometer and pull at 125-130F for pink, as a tenderloin this small overshoots quickly.
DrippingsProbably beef or veal roasting fat, though the recipe does not specify. Clarified butter or a neutral oil with a spoonful of butter does the same job.
Meat glazeRanhofer's No. 402 is glace de viande: brown stock reduced until it sets to a syrup. A tablespoon of commercial demi-glace concentrate or heavily reduced veal stock stands in. The recipe's "as much meat glaze as butter" means one ounce by weight.
Clear gravyHis No. 404 is a strained, ungarnished brown gravy. A few spoonfuls of reduced lamb or veal jus over the toast is the intent; it should be thin enough to soak the bread.
The marrowBuy centre-cut marrow bones, push the marrow out after an hour in cold water, dice it a quarter inch and dip briefly in boiling water so it firms and loses its blood. Add it to the sauce off the heat or at the barest simmer, or it melts to grease.
The sauce is a butter sauce, not a simmered oneTwo minutes on the fire is all it gets, so keep it warm rather than hot. Note that Ranhofer adds the lemon juice and parsley at the start along with the butter and glaze; holding them back to the end keeps them brighter.
YieldThe recipe gives no quantities for the meat; four fillets on four oblong toasts would serve four as a course in a long menu, or two as a main plate.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the Delmonico's kitchens in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the restaurant's working repertoire set down in a thousand-page book, numbered and cross-referenced like a catalogue. This entry shows the system at work: the reader is expected to already have No. 402 glaze and No. 404 gravy standing by, which is how a professional kitchen operated and why the book was more useful to chefs than to households. The pairing of shallot, meat glaze and poached beef marrow belongs to the same French family as sauce bordelaise, a garnish generally traced to the wine-and-marrow cookery of southwest France and standard in nineteenth-century grande cuisine. "Filet mignon" here simply means the little tenderloin of the animal in question, lamb rather than beef; its narrowing to a beef steak is a later, largely American development.