No. 2373

Lamb Minion Fillet Tart or Pie a la Manning

Tarte de Filets Mignons d'Agneau a la Manning

Remove the fat and sinews from some yearling lamb fillets, wrap them up in thin slices of veal suet, and roast till rare, then cut them into escalops and range the pieces in a buttered deep pie dish (Fig. 183), intercalating the thin slices of suet with the slices of fillet. Fry in butter some cut-up shallot, add to it mushrooms and chopped parsley, and moisten with a little espagnole sauce (No. 414) and good gravy (No. 414) and good gravy (No. 404); pour this over the fillets and cover the edge of the dish with a band of puff paste, and the top with a flat of the same rolled to an eighth of an inch thickness; stick this to the band of paste, egg the surface and cook it for one hour in a moderately heated oven. After withdrawing the pie from the fire, make an opening in the middle of the upper crust, and fill the inside with a brown Madeira sauce (No. 492) finished with mushroom essence (No. 392).

← No. 2372 Chicken Tart or Pie, Australian Style Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2374 Lobster Tart or Pie a la a Herault →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a brigade, a stocked sauce station and a deep oval pie dish. Stripped back, this is a lamb loin pie: the meat is roasted rare first, sliced, layered with fat, sauced and finished under a puff-pastry lid.

The hinge: the lamb is already cookedThe fillets go in roasted rare and are only being warmed through under the crust. A full hour at any real oven heat will take them to grey. Bake only long enough to set and brown the pastry, roughly 35 to 40 minutes at 400F, and accept a slightly paler top rather than overcooked meat.
"Filets mignons d'agneau"Not beef tenderloin in miniature. Ranhofer means the strip of loin or the small tenderloin from a yearling lamb. Two lamb loins or four or five lamb tenderloins, trimmed of fat and silverskin, will fill a 1.5 quart dish.
Veal suetThe hard fat from around veal kidneys, sliced thin and used both as a barding wrap for roasting and as layers between the escalops. Caul fat or thinly sliced pork back fat does the same work and is far easier to buy; the point is basting, not flavour.
EscalopsSlices cut on a steep bias, about a quarter inch thick, so each piece has a broad face. Cut the loin after it has rested and cooled a little or the slices tear.
Espagnole and "good gravy"Both are cross-references to Ranhofer's sauce chapter: a brown roux-based mother sauce and a reduced brown stock. A good demi-glace, or well-reduced veal or lamb stock with a little tomato, stands in for both. You need only enough to bind the shallot, mushroom and parsley into a moist filling, not to flood the dish.
Moderately heated ovenRanhofer gives no figures; the phrase is usually taken to mean somewhere around 350F. Puff pastry, however, wants a hotter start to rise, so 400F for the shorter bake above is the better trade.
The paste bandA strip of puff pastry laid round the rim of the dish first, then the lid stuck to it and the surface egged afterwards. It gives the lid something to grip so it does not slide off as the filling steams.
Madeira sauce and mushroom essencePoured in through a hole cut in the baked crust. Mushroom essence is simply the strained, reduced liquor from cooking mushrooms; reducing the soaking liquid from dried mushrooms gives the same concentrated effect. Add it off the heat so it keeps its aroma.
YieldA deep dish built on two lamb loins serves four to six as a course, with a green salad or plain buttered vegetables. There is no starch on the plate beyond the crust.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the working compendium of his decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the book's habits clearly: French title, numbered cross-references to sauces made elsewhere in the kitchen, and a dedication in the name of a patron or colleague. Dishes "a la Manning" and the hundreds of similar personal dedications scattered through the book are often said to have been the house's way of flattering regular customers and marking occasions, and many of those names are hard to trace today, which is itself a fair record of how Gilded Age restaurant cooking worked. The construction, expensive loin roasted rare, then sliced and reassembled under pastry with a made sauce poured in at the last moment, is characteristic of late nineteenth-century restaurant cooking. Veal suet as both barding and interleaving fat is generally taken to have been ordinary practice when butchers broke down whole animals and kidney fat was a byproduct to be used, not a specialty order.