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Epigramme of Lamb with Curry
Carefully pare six fine French lamb chops. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper; lightly roll in melted butter, then in fresh bread crumbs, and keep on a plate.
Boil a breast of lamb in two gallons boiling water, containing a mirepoix and two tablespoons salt, for one hour and a half. Remove the breast, pick out all the bones, then place the meat between two dry, clean towels, put a heavy weight on top and let remain in that condition for thirty minutes. Remove the weight and towels and cut the breast in six equal heart-shaped pieces. Lightly roll in melted butter, then in fresh bread crumbs. Heat four tablespoons melted lard in a large frying pan, place the chops and the breasts, one beside another, in the pan and gently cook on the range for five minutes on each side. Lift them up with a skimmer, thoroughly drain on a cloth. Pour a hot curry sauce, on a hot dish, and arrange the chops and breasts in crown shape, one overlapping another, upon the curry, adjust a paper frill at the end of each chop and serve as hot as possible.
A two-part lamb dish: rib chops and pressed, breaded breast, both pan-fried and served over curry sauce. Most of the work is in the breast, and it has to be done ahead.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon. Sizeable for six chops.
- French lamb chopsRib chops with the bone scraped clean at the end — what a butcher today calls frenched. That bared bone is what the paper frill goes on.
- MirepoixIn this period simply the aromatic base: roughly diced onion, carrot and celery, often with a bay leaf, thyme sprig and a few peppercorns. Nothing is strained or saved here, so quantities are loose.
- The pressing is the pointBoiled lamb breast is soft and gelatinous; weighting it flat between towels for thirty minutes compacts it so it can be cut into clean heart shapes and crumbed without falling apart. Skip the press and you have no epigrammes, just fried scraps. A plate with a few tins on it does the job, and chilling it while pressed makes cutting far easier than the original implies.
- Two gallons of waterOnly so the breast stays fully submerged. A smaller pot with just enough water to cover works the same; scale the two tablespoons salt down proportionally or the meat will be oversalted.
- The frying fatFour tablespoons lard in a wide pan over medium heat. Butter alone will burn at the crumbing stage; clarified butter, or oil with a knob of butter, gives the same colour.
- Cooking timesThe breast is already cooked through, so its five minutes a side is for colour; the chops, however, are raw going in and are being cooked through in the pan. If your chops are thick-cut, brown them and finish in a 375F oven rather than extending the pan time, which dries them and darkens the crumbs.
- The curry sauceNone is given here; you are presumably meant to use a curry sauce from elsewhere in the book. Any well-reduced curry sauce works, but keep it thick enough to hold the crown of chops upright and pour it under the meat, not over, so the crumb stays crisp.
- YieldTwelve pieces in all: six chops and six pieces of breast. The recipe's own counts point to six portions; with rice it will stretch to serve four to six.
An épigramme d'agneau is a set piece of classical French cookery: two contrasting cuts of the same animal, a cutlet and a crumbed piece of pressed breast cut to the same shape, served together so the plate looks uniform while the eating is not. The name is usually explained by an eighteenth-century anecdote — a hostess who heard epigrams praised at a dinner party and instructed her cook to serve some — a story repeated in cookery literature for well over a century and best treated as kitchen folklore rather than documented fact. The pairing with curry sauce is more telling about this book: The International Cook Book (1906), compiled by Alexander Filippini of Delmonico's, ran French technique alongside dishes gathered from across the world, and by 1900 a curry sauce was a standard item in an American hotel kitchen's repertoire, thickened and mild, closer to a flavoured velouté than to anything from the subcontinent. The paper frills at the bone ends belong to the same era of service, when a dish was expected to arrive built rather than plated.