No. 1767

Lambs' Trotters a la Chantilly

Pieds d'Agneau a la Chantilly

Prepare the feet the same as indicated for poulette (No. 1768), placing them in a saucepan with two spoonfuls of chopped onions and shallots; moisten with two gills of white wine, and reduce to half, adding two gills of veloute sauce (No. 415), a garnished bouquet (No. 123), and a few fresh mushroom peelings; boil and reduce the sauce without ceasing to stir, incorporating slowly in it a few spoonfuls of mushroom broth, and when it is well reduced and succulent, strain and add to it the lambs' trotters; let them simmer in the sauce for twelve minutes over a very slow fire; at the last moment thicken the sauce with two raw egg-yolks diluted in cream. Take the stew from the fire and finish it with a few pieces of butter, a pinch of chopped parsley and lemon juice. Dress the feet on a hot dish, strain the sauce over, and surround with a string of small stuffed mushrooms (No. 650), or should they be too large cut them in two.

← No. 1766 Lambs' Trotters a la Bordelaise and a la Bor Lamb No. 1768 Lambs' Trotters a la Poulette and a la Didie →

For the Modern Kitchen

A cross-referenced entry from Ranhofer's The Epicurean, so it assumes you have already cleaned and blanched the feet by No. 1768 and have veloute on hand. The hinge is the finish: once the egg yolks go in, the sauce must not boil.

GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup. The recipe calls for a cup of white wine reduced by half, then a cup of veloute.
Sourcing the feetLambs' trotters are a butcher or halal-market item, rarely a supermarket one; order ahead and ask for them scalded and the hooves off. The yield of edible gelatinous meat per foot is small, so plan on several per person as a first course.
Preparing them firstNo. 1768 covers the preliminary work this recipe assumes: the cleaning, blanching and long slow cooking until tender that come before any of this, typically in a blanc. Check that entry for the exact method. Either way it is hours of work before this recipe begins, and the twelve minutes here is finishing in sauce, not cooking.
VelouteNo. 415 is a white stock thickened with a blond roux and simmered until clean. A cup of good chicken or veal veloute made the day before is the substitute; canned or powdered sauce base will not reduce well and will turn salty as it does.
Mushroom peelings and brothRanhofer's kitchen turned mushrooms for garnish and kept the trimmings, so peelings and their cooking liquor were free flavour. Modern cooks can simmer a handful of chopped mushroom stems in a little water for fifteen minutes and use that as the broth, adding it in spoonfuls as the sauce reduces.
The garnished bouquetNo. 123 is a bouquet garni: parsley, thyme and bay tied in a bundle, sometimes with other aromatics such as celery or leek. It comes out at the straining stage.
The liaisonTwo raw yolks slaked with cream are stirred in off direct heat and the pan taken from the fire immediately. Anything approaching a simmer scrambles them and the sauce breaks into threads. Temper the yolks with a ladle of hot sauce first.
Very slow fireThe twelve-minute simmer should be at a bare tremble, well below a boil. Lambs' feet are already tender at this point and hard boiling shreds them and clouds the sauce.
Stuffed mushroomsNo. 650 is stuffed mushroom caps, filled with a forcemeat. Small caps ring the dish; larger ones halved, as the text allows.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of that kitchen, which is why entries like this one lean on numbered cross-references rather than repeating themselves. The dish belongs to the classical French repertoire of offal cookery, in which feet, ears and heads were treated with the same sauces given to poultry and sweetbreads; a la Chantilly here signals the enrichment with cream and egg yolks rather than any connection to the sweetened whipped cream that carries the same name in pastry. Lambs' and sheep's trotters were cheap, gelatinous and once common on both restaurant and household tables on either side of the Atlantic, and their near-disappearance from American menus over the twentieth century says more about changing squeamishness than about the eating. The elaborate finish, three separate sub-recipes deep, is characteristic of the Delmonico's approach: a humble cut given the full apparatus of the brigade.