No. 2170

Venison Cutlets a la Buridan

Cotelettes de Chevreuil a la Buridan

Have some well-pared cutlets (see mutton cutlets, No. 1590), lard them on one side only with fine larding pork (No. 4, Fig. 52), all on the same side so that the handle is on the right; put them in cold marinade for three hours. Make some coffeespoon quenelles (No. 155) with young rabbit and game quenelle forcemeat (No. 91), poach in boiling water and drain. Saute the cutlets in butter, drain it off and replace it by a little game glaze (No. 398) and a gill of vinegar to detach the glaze from the pan, adding a little brown sauce (No. 414); allow it to boil up once or twice and then strain through a sieve and add the quenelles; glaze the cutlets and garnish with paper frills (No. 10). Dish up the cutlets in a circle, fill the center with the quenelles, and serve the sauce separately. Garnish around with small round croquettes made like croquettes a la trimalcion (No. 3016).

← No. 2169 Rack of Venison, Roasted Colbert Sauce Venison & Large Game No. 2171 Venison Cutlets a la Cauchoise →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes in cross-references, assuming a brigade with stock, forcemeat and glaze already standing by. Stripped down, this is a sauté of larded venison chops with a sharp glaze-and-vinegar pan sauce, quenelles in the centre and croquettes around the edge.

The hinge: cook the venison rareRoe deer cutlets are almost fatless and turn dry and livery past medium rare. Sauté hot and fast and pull them at 125-130F internal; they will carry to about 135F while you build the sauce.
Chevreuil and the cutChevreuil is roe deer, a small animal whose rack yields chops the size of lamb cutlets. Farmed venison or a rack of red deer works; French-trim the bones as for mutton cutlets so the frills sit properly on the exposed handle.
Larding on one sideFine strips of hard back fat drawn through the surface with a larding needle, all running the same way so the cutlets look uniform when arranged in a ring. Fresh unsmoked fatback, chilled firm, is what Ranhofer's larding pork (No. 4) is; the one-sided placement here is presentational, though larding also bastes very lean meat as it cooks.
A gill of vinegarHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. That is a great deal of vinegar for a few cutlets, and Ranhofer only has it boil up once or twice with the glaze and brown sauce before straining. If you want it milder, add it in stages and taste.
Cold marinadeThe period cold marinade is an uncooked one: wine, vinegar, oil and aromatics used raw rather than boiled. Three hours is a short soak, enough to season the surface without turning the meat mushy. Marinate in the refrigerator, not at room temperature.
Game glaze and brown sauceNo. 398 is game stock reduced to a syrup; No. 414 is espagnole. Substitute a strongly reduced venison or beef stock plus a spoonful of demi-glace. Without one of these the vinegar has nothing to bind to.
Coffeespoon quenellesA coffeespoon is roughly a teaspoon, so these are small dumplings shaped between two spoons from rabbit and game forcemeat. Poach them at a bare shiver rather than a rolling boil, which breaks them, and lift them out as soon as they firm and float.
Paper frills and croquettesThe frills are decorative cuffs for the bone ends and are entirely optional now. The croquettes are a separate deep-fried garnish requiring their own recipe; the dish stands perfectly well without them.
YieldRanhofer gives none. Reckon two to three cutlets a person, so eight to twelve chops for four, with the quenelles and sauce scaled to match.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is organised like a professional reference rather than a cookbook: almost every recipe leans on numbered forcemeats, glazes and mother sauces set out elsewhere in the volume. Garnish names of this kind were the currency of nineteenth-century French kitchens, drawn from history, literature and the stage, and Buridan is generally traced to Jean Buridan, the fourteenth-century Paris philosopher remembered for the paradox of the ass starving between two identical bales of hay, and revived as a swashbuckling character in La Tour de Nesle (1832), the play co-written by Fr/eric Gaillardet with Dumas p/ere. Whether Ranhofer or an earlier French chef attached the name to larded roe-deer cutlets is not documented. The dish itself reflects how game was handled in the grand restaurant kitchen: larded because deer are very lean, and dressed with a vinegar-sharpened brown sauce in the long tradition of cutting rich game with acid.