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Lamb Breast, Hongroise
Cut two and half pounds breast of lamb into one-inch squares. Season with a teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon paprika, place in a small roasting pan, lightly baste with a little melted butter, set in a brisk oven for forty minutes or until a nice golden colour, being careful to turn the pieces once in a while, remove and keep hot.
Place four ounces raw rice in a saucepan, moisten with a pint broth, add one ounce butter, season with a half teaspoon salt and a saltspoon paprika. Cover and set in the oven for thirty-five minutes, remove, pour in a half gill cream and two saltspoons grated Parmesan cheese, briskly stir, then dress on a dome-shaped hot dish and arrange the lamb on top rice. Skim fat from gravy in pan, pour in a gill pure tomato juice, boil for five minutes, then pour over the breast, sprinkle little chopped parsley over and serve.
A straightforward two-part dish: roasted lamb breast on a paprika rice pilaf. The measurements are the main obstacle, along with the fat that breast of lamb throws off.
- Brisk ovenRead "brisk" as 425F. The rice, however, does better at 350F, so if you want to bake both at once, roast the lamb first at 425F and drop the oven before the rice goes in.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so the tomato juice is 1/2 cup and the cream 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, which makes the Parmesan roughly half a teaspoon grated -- a flavouring, not a cheesy rice.
- Breast of lambThis is the fatty belly cut, laced with cartilage and rib tips. Cut into one-inch pieces it renders a great deal of fat in forty minutes; pour it off partway through or the meat braises in grease instead of browning. Many butchers sell it only on order.
- Cook it longer if it is toughForty minutes gives colour but breast is a connective-tissue cut. If the pieces are chewy, cover and continue at 325F until they give easily, then uncover to re-brown.
- The rice ratioFour ounces of raw rice is roughly half to two-thirds of a cup, and a pint of broth is 2 cups, so the ratio is about four to one. That is high for a covered oven pilaf; check at 25 minutes and add broth only if it has gone dry. The recipe does not name a variety; long-grain white rice is the likely intention.
- PaprikaUse sweet Hungarian paprika and buy it fresh. Old paprika is dusty and bitter, and it is doing most of the seasoning work here alongside salt.
- Tomato juice"Pure tomato juice" means unseasoned juice, not the salted, spiced cocktail sort. Passata or thin canned tomato purée gives a closer result; five minutes of boiling in the pan drippings is enough to bind it.
- YieldTwo and a half pounds of bone-in breast plus the rice serves three, perhaps four with a vegetable.
"À la hongroise" is the standard French kitchen shorthand for Hungarian style, and in practice it means paprika and cream — the two ingredients Escoffier-era cooks treated as the signature of Hungarian cooking after paprika spread out of Hungary into professional French kitchens in the later nineteenth century. Serving meat heaped on a dome of rice or a rice border was a common plating convention of the period.