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Brochettes of Lamb with Mushrooms
Cut one and a half pounds very lean lamb in one-inch squares and quarter-inch thick. Cut same number pieces of well-cleaned fresh mushrooms. Plunge mushrooms in boiling water five minutes, drain well. Then arrange lamb and mushrooms alternately on six skewers. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, lightly turn in oil, then in bread crumbs, arrange on a double broiler and broil six minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a dish, spread a maitre d'hotel butter over them and send to table.
A straightforward skewer dish that assumes a live-coal fire and a hinged wire broiler. The main adjustments are the heat source and the compound butter, which the recipe names but does not explain.
- Maître d'hôtel butterThe finish is not optional — it is the sauce. Cream about 4 tablespoons softened butter with a tablespoon of chopped parsley, a teaspoon or two of lemon juice, salt and pepper, and keep it cool until the skewers come off the heat so it melts over them at the table.
- "Double broiler"Not a double boiler. This is a hinged wire basket that clamps the food between two grids so a whole rack of skewers can be turned at once over coals. A grill grate or a rack set over a sheet pan under the oven broiler does the same work.
- Heat and timingSix minutes a side suits a moderate coal fire. Under a modern gas or electric broiler at full heat, breadcrumb-coated lamb this thin is done in 3 to 4 minutes a side; the crumbs will scorch before the meat is cooked if you go the full twelve.
- The cutOne-inch squares a quarter-inch thick means thin slices, not cubes — trimmed loin or leg sliced and cut down works well. Thin pieces cook fast, which is the point of the dish.
- Blanching the mushroomsThe five-minute plunge in boiling water is not explained here; it may have been aimed at softening tougher wild or field mushrooms. Cultivated button or cremini need no more than a minute, or none at all; long boiling leaves them watery and they will not take the crumbs.
- Oil and crumbsTurn the assembled skewers in oil, then roll in fine dry crumbs and press them on. Fresh soft crumbs go soggy and slide off under the broiler.
- SkewersMetal skewers are the likely intention, given the coal fire. If using bamboo, soak them 30 minutes and shield the exposed ends with foil.
- YieldSix skewers from a pound and a half of lamb: three to six servings depending on whether it is a main course or one course among several, as it may well have been when the book was written.
Brochette is simply the French word for a small skewer, and the term came into English as a genteel label for food cooked over fire on a stick. The technique is ancient and near-universal u2014 Turkish and Levantine şiş/kebab, Greek souvlaki, Japanese kushiyaki — but the treatment here is unmistakably that of the professional French kitchen: the meat cut to uniform thin squares, oiled and crumbed so it takes on a crust in the hinged broiler, and finished with maître d'hôtel butter, the parsley-lemon compound butter that was the standard grill dressing in hotel cookery. Its apparent placement in a chapter on the world's cooking says something about how early twentieth-century American cookbooks presented foreign food: an international dish reached the English-speaking home cook filtered through a French professional vocabulary, which is why a plain lamb skewer arrives on the page under a French name.