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Lamb En Bordure, Bourgeoise
Cut up all the meat from leg of lamb left over from yesterday in half-inch pieces; cut in same way three ounces lean salt pork. Heat in a saucepan two tablespoons leaf lard, add one finely sliced white onion and the pork and fry to a light brown, stirring meanwhile; add one tablespoon flour, stir well. Moisten with one-half gill white wine and three gills broth, mix well, then add the lamb with a half bean chopped garlic, a light teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper and a half teaspoon chopped chives. Mix well, place the lid on, cook on the range for five minutes, then set in the oven for thirty minutes. Remove, skim fat from the surface and keep hot. Boil four medium, peeled potatoes for thirty-five minutes in two quarts boiling water with a half teaspoon salt, drain on a sieve, then press through a potato masher into a bowl, add one egg and the yolk of another, a half ounce butter, a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Sharply stir with the spatula till smooth. Slide a dentilated tube at the bottom of a pastry bag, drop the preparation into it and press down around the edges of a baking dish as a border, pour the lamb stew into the centre, dredge two tablespoons bread crumbs over, then set in the oven for fifteen minutes. Remove and serve.
A leftovers dish dressed up as a composed course: yesterday's roast lamb rebuilt as a small stew and piped into a ring of duchesse potato. The measurements are pre-metric restaurant shorthand, and one or two of the timings belong to an older stove.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is 1/2 cup, so half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup and three gills of broth is 1 1/2 cups. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, making the pepper about 3/4 teaspoon in the stew and 1/2 teaspoon in the potatoes.
- "A half bean" of garlicAlmost certainly a literal rendering of the French half-gousse, i.e. half a clove; either way the intended amount is small. It is a restrained quantity, and a full clove will not spoil the dish.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all; the book simply says "the oven." A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern working guess for both stages: thirty minutes for the stew, then fifteen minutes at the end to set and colour the potato border.
- Leaf lard and salt porkLeaf lard is the rendered fat from around the kidneys, still sold by some butchers; ordinary lard, or two tablespoons of a neutral fat, does the same work. The three ounces of lean salt pork are for seasoning and fat, not bulk, and pancetta is the closest common substitute.
- The potatoesThirty-five minutes is for whole medium potatoes in a large pot of water. Quartered, they are done in about twenty. Drain them very dry and mash them while hot; wet or cool potato gives a slack piping that slumps in the oven.
- Piping the borderA "dentilated tube" is a star tip. The egg and extra yolk are what let the border hold its ridges, so add them to hot potato and beat hard, then pipe at once while the mixture is still warm and stiff.
- Reheating cooked lambThe meat is already roasted, so the half hour in the oven is about the sauce, not the lamb. Cut the pieces no smaller than half an inch and skim the fat as directed, or the finished stew tastes greasy under the crumbs.
- YieldNo yield is stated. Four medium potatoes and the leftover leg meat suggest a dish for about four, served straight from the baking dish.
En bordure simply means "in a border" — the stew is contained by a piped rim of potato, a plating device that let a restaurant kitchen send out something that looked composed rather than reheated. Bourgeoise in French menu language signals the plain home-style treatment: onion, salt pork, a spoon of flour, wine and broth. The potato ring itself is duchesse potato, mashed potato enriched with whole egg and yolk so it holds a piped shape and browns; it was one of the standard garnishes of the professional repertoire by the late nineteenth century and turns up under that name throughout French kitchen manuals of the period. The instruction to use "meat from leg of lamb left over from yesterday" places the recipe in a long tradition of réchauffés — chapters devoted to made-over dishes were a fixture of large cookbooks of this era, when a joint was expected to feed a household across several meals and the cook's skill lay in disguising the fact.