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Lamb Fries, Tomato Sauce
Neatly skin and cut into halves twelve fresh lamb fries. Plunge them in a quart boiling water with a teaspoon salt for two minutes, drain well. Season with half a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Lightly roll them in flour, then in beaten-up egg and lastly in bread crumbs. Plunge them in boiling fat and fry for five minutes. Drain well, dress on a hot dish, and serve with a gill hot tomato sauce separately.
A straightforward breaded-and-fried offal dish; the only real difficulty is sourcing and cleaning the main ingredient. Everything else is standard crumbing procedure.
- What lamb fries areLamb testicles, sold as "fries" or "animelles" by butchers who handle whole lambs, and often frozen. They are not a supermarket item; order ahead, and ask whether they come already skinned.
- The skinning is the hingeEach fry is wrapped in a tough outer membrane that will shrink and turn leathery in the fat if left on. Slit it with the point of a knife and peel it away whole before halving, as the recipe directs; the two-minute plunge in salted water that follows firms the flesh.
- A saltspoonA quarter teaspoon. So "two saltspoons white pepper" is half a teaspoon, which is assertive but correct for offal.
- A gillA quarter-pint of tomato sauce, roughly half a cup (5 fl oz if the measure is British), served in a boat alongside rather than poured over, as the recipe's "separately" directs.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe says only "boiling fat," i.e. deep fat hot enough to fry briskly; in modern terms this is usually taken to be somewhere around 350-375F. Too cool and the egg-and-crumb coating soaks; too hot and the crumbs colour before the interior is hot.
- Five minutes is longHalved fries are thin, and the two-minute plunge has already firmed them. Three to four minutes to a deep gold may serve; fried longer, the texture goes firm and dry.
- Crumbing orderFlour, egg, crumbs, as written, but let the breaded pieces rest ten minutes on a rack before frying so the coating sets and does not slip in the fat.
- YieldTwelve fries cut in halves gives twenty-four pieces, enough for four as a main course or six or more as a first course.
"Fries" is often used as a butcher's word for testicles, though the term is not exclusive to them — British and Australian usage has "lamb's fry" for liver, or the pluck generally — and the dish belongs to a long European tradition of cooking them: the French called them animelles, the Italians granelli, and both were treated much as this recipe treats them, blanched, crumbed and fried, with something sharp alongside. The tomato sauce is served separately. In the United States the same organ, usually from calves or lambs at spring castration time, became known as "mountain oysters" or "prairie oysters," a ranch-country dish rather than a hotel one.