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Lamb Fries, Horly
Cut in halves and remove skin from twelve very fresh lamb fries, plunge in boiling water for five minutes, lift up and thoroughly drain on a cloth. Place in a bowl, squeeze in juice of half a sound lemon, add half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, one teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, a saltspoon grated nutmeg, and thoroughly mingle fries in seasoning. Prepare a frying batter, roll lamb fries in the batter, then immediately drop one by one in boiling fat and fry for ten minutes, turning with skimmer once in a while. Remove, drain on a cloth, dress on dish with a folded napkin, decorate with a little parsley greens and serve with gill of tomato sauce separately.
A batter-fried offal dish in the classic à l'Orly style, written for a kitchen that could get lamb testicles fresh from the butcher the morning they arrived. The method is sound; the frying time and the missing batter formula are what need attention.
- What lamb fries areLamb testicles, sold as lamb fries, animelles or (in the American West) mountain oysters. Order them from a halal or whole-animal butcher; they freeze acceptably but are best used within a day or two of thawing.
- The membrane is the hingeThe tough outer skin must come off completely or the fries will curl and seize in the fat. Note that this recipe takes the skin off first and blanches the halved fries for five minutes afterwards, which firms them for battering; if you find the membrane easier to lift once the fries have been warmed, you can reverse the two steps.
- Ten minutes is too longHalved fries in hot fat are cooked through in three to four minutes at 350–360°F, by which point the batter is golden. Ten minutes at that temperature gives you a dark, greasy crust over dry, grainy meat. Fry in small batches so the oil does not drop below 340°F.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously around what is dropped in, roughly 350–375°F. Use a thermometer rather than guessing.
- The frying batterNone is given here; the direction 'prepare a frying batter' assumes a standard formula the reader already had to hand. A plain pate a frire -- about 1 cup flour, 2/3 cup warm water or beer, a tablespoon of oil, a pinch of salt, rested an hour, with a stiffly beaten egg white folded in at the last minute -- is a reasonable stand-in.
- Small measuresA saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, so the tomato sauce is served in a small sauceboat alongside, not poured over — the batter would go soft.
- The napkinDressing fried food on a folded napkin was standard hotel practice to absorb fat at the table. A rack over paper does the same job and keeps the crust crisp; the napkin is optional theatre.
- YieldTwelve fries, halved, gives twenty-four pieces — a first course for six, or a main for three or four with the tomato sauce and a sharp salad.
"Horly" is a spelling variant of Orly that appears in a number of period cookbooks, the French garnish that means a food dipped in frying batter, deep-fried and sent out with tomato sauce apart; sole à l'Orly is the version most cookbooks of the era list, and the name is generally traced to the town south of Paris rather than to any documented cook. Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) came out of the Delmonico's tradition, where offal was not a curiosity but a routine part of the carte — brains, sweetbreads, kidneys and animelles all appear with the same matter-of-fact French treatment. Lamb fries survived longest in two places: the French repertoire, where they are animelles, and the American ranching states, where the spring castration of lambs and calves produced them in quantity and the frying pan settled the question of what to do with them.