Home › The World's Kitchen › Epigrammes of Lamb with Peas
Epigrammes of Lamb with Peas
Carefully pare six fine French lamb chops. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, lightly turn them in melted butter, then in fresh bread crumbs, and keep on a plate. Boil a breast of lamb in two gallons water, add a mirepoix season with two tablespoons of salt and cook for one and a half hours. Lift up the breast, pick out all the bones from the meat, place the breast between two coarse towels, lay a heavy weight on top of the meat and let stand in that condition for thirty minutes; remove the weight and towels, then cut the breast into six equal heart-shaped pieces, slightly roll them in melted butter, then in fresh bread crumbs. Heat four tablespoons melted lard in a large frying pan, place the chops and breasts, one beside another, in the pan and gently cook for five minutes on each side. Lift them up with a skimmer, thoroughly drain on a cloth, pour a gill hot tomato sauce on a hot dish; arrange the chops and breasts alternately, one overlapping another, crown-like, on the tomato sauce; adjust a paper frill at the end of each chop, place green peas in the centre of the crown and serve.
An épigramme is a plated pairing of two cuts of lamb cooked two ways — here a trimmed rib chop and a piece of braised, pressed, crumbed breast. Nothing about it is difficult, but the timing depends entirely on the pressing step, which has to be done well ahead.
- Press the breast, and press it coldThe weighting is the hinge of the dish: without it the boiled breast will not hold a clean heart-shaped cut or fry without falling apart. Thirty minutes under a weight is a minimum; several hours in the refrigerator under a board and a few cans gives far better slices, and cold breast crumbs and fries more neatly than warm.
- "French lamb chops"Rib chops with the bone scraped clean at the end — what a butcher now calls frenched. That bared bone is what the paper frill goes on.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of pepper. A gill is half a cup, which is the right amount of tomato sauce for a pool under six pieces rather than a sauced dish.
- MirepoixIn this period, a rough dice of onion, carrot and celery with a bay leaf and a few peppercorns, added to the cooking water. No fixed quantity is implied; one of each vegetable is plenty for two gallons.
- Two tablespoons salt in two gallonsThat is a light brine, around half a percent, which seasons the meat as it simmers. If you use less water, keep the same ratio of salt to water.
- Boil means simmerA breast held at a rolling boil for ninety minutes will shred. Bring it up, skim, and hold it at a bare tremble until the rib bones pull out clean.
- LardFour tablespoons of lard in a wide pan is a shallow fry, not a sauté. Clarified butter or a neutral oil behaves the same way; whole butter will brown too fast for ten minutes of cooking.
- Cooking timeFive minutes a side suits a thick chop taken to the pink side of medium and is only browning the breast, which is already cooked through. Thin supermarket chops will be well past that in half the time.
- YieldSix chops and six pieces of breast serve six as a course, or three as a main. The peas in the centre are the whole garnish, so allow a generous cup or two.
The épigramme d'agneau is a fixture of nineteenth-century French service and turns on the contrast between a quickly grilled or fried chop and a slow-cooked, pressed, crumbed piece of the cheap cut beside it — a thrifty idea dressed as an elegant one, since the breast is among the least expensive parts of the animal. The name has attracted a durable piece of table folklore: it is often said to have come from an eighteenth-century Parisian dinner at which a hostess, hearing epigrams praised in conversation and misunderstanding, ordered her cook to send some up. The story is repeated in kitchen literature without documentation and should be treated as an anecdote rather than an origin. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, gathered dishes like this into The International Cook Book (1906) for American households with ambitions toward the French repertoire; the paper frills and the crown arrangement belong to the same era of restaurant presentation, when a dish was expected to arrive built rather than merely plated.