No. 2561

Lamb Pie-Loin

Pate de Longe d'Agneau

Bone two loins and two shoulders of spring lamb; cut the loin meats into squares, lard them with larding pork and season with salt, pepper, nutmeg and spices. Chop up the shoulder meats free of all sinews and fat and add to it the same weight of fat pork, season with salt, pepper, nutmeg and spice, then pound the whole in a mortar, mixing in a little Madeira wine. Clean well and butter a pie mold, line it with ordinary pie paste (No. 144) and cover the bottom and sides with thin slices of fat pork; mask these with a layer of the forcemeat and place some slices of cooked ham on the bottom, then a layer of the forcemeat and the larded squares over, finishing with more forcemeat, having the mold quite full and rounded on the top; cover with bards of fat pork and in the center place a bay leaf and a sprig of thyme. Cover the pie with a flat of paste, having a raised edge on the border, pinch it all around and decorate the top with imitation leaves cut from puff or noodle paste and a paste artichoke (No. 2556) in the center. Egg the surfaces and cook in a medium oven, then fill up with jelly when the pie is thoroughly cold.

← No. 2560 Hare Pie Without a Mold Garnishings for Cold Dishes No. 2562 Goose Liver Pie →

For the Modern Kitchen

A raised pâté en croûte from the Delmonico's kitchen, built in a hinged mold and finished with aspic. Nearly everything here still works; what the text leaves out is temperature, timing and the vent hole.

Cook to temperature, not to colorThe pastry will brown long before the center of a full mold is done. A pâté this size needs an internal reading of about 155-160F at the middle, which typically takes 1 1/2 to 2 hours; tent the top with foil once it has taken color.
"Medium oven"Call it about 350F. Ranhofer's medium falls between his slow and his quick ovens; he gives no thermometer readings, so the Fahrenheit figures are modern approximations.
You need a chimneyThe recipe says to fill the cold pie with jelly but never tells you how. Cut one or two holes in the pastry lid before baking and fit a rolled foil or parchment tube; steam escapes during baking and the aspic goes in through the same hole afterward.
Pie moldA hinged rectangular or oval pâté mold, buttered and lined with paste. A loaf pan lined with parchment slings will work, though the sides bake less crisply.
Larding pork and bardsLarding pork is firm back fat cut into lardons and drawn through the meat with a larding needle; bards are the same fat sliced thin as a lining and lid. Ask a butcher for fatback, or use thin-sliced unsmoked pork belly for the bards. Frozen fat cuts far more cleanly than fresh.
"Spices"Most likely a compound spice mixture of the kind used in period charcuterie (pepper, nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, bay, thyme). Quatre epices is the nearest thing on a modern shelf. Season the forcemeat firmly; cold food tastes flatter than hot, and this is served cold.
Test the forcemeatFry a teaspoon of the pounded shoulder mixture and taste before the mold is assembled. Once the pastry is on, nothing can be corrected.
The jellyA well-clarified, strongly set meat aspic, poured in barely warm through the vent while the pie is thoroughly cold, so it fills the gaps left as the meat shrank. Do this the day before serving and refrigerate overnight.
YieldTwo loins and two shoulders of lamb with an equal weight of fat pork in the forcemeat makes a very large pate, enough for dozens of cold slices. Halving the quantities and using a single loaf-sized mold is more practical.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled from roughly three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it sits in the section on garnishings for cold dishes rather than among the roasts, because a pate like this was as much architecture as food. The paste artichoke in the center and the cut leaves of noodle paste were meant to be seen, on a buffet or a cold sideboard, where the pie stood among galantines and molded jellies before anyone cut it. The aspic poured in at the end is functional as well as decorative: it fills the gaps and seals the meat from air under the crust, as in the older raised pies in which the pastry was a container first and a food second.