Home › The World's Kitchen › Lamb Steaks, Bordelaise
Lamb Steaks, Bordelaise
Procure three three-quarter-pound steaks from a tender leg of lamb. Season all around with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, then rub them with a teaspoon of oil, arrange on the broiler and broil for eight minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a dish, pour a hot Bordelaise sauce over the steaks, sprinkle half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley over and serve.
A straightforward broiled lamb dish whose only real complication is that the sauce is assumed rather than given. Everything else is a matter of thickness and heat.
- The sauce is a separate jobBordelaise is a red wine reduction with shallots and demi-glace, finished in the classic version with poached beef marrow. The book expects you to have it from another page; make or buy it before the lamb goes under the heat, since the steaks are ready in under twenty minutes.
- "Steaks from a leg"These are leg steaks cut across the bone, sometimes sold as lamb leg chops or centre-cut leg steaks. Three-quarters of a pound each means a cut roughly an inch to an inch and a quarter thick. Butchers now often cut them thinner, which changes the timing entirely.
- Broiling timesEight minutes a side suits a thick, bone-in steak under a hot broiler set a few inches from the element, giving something close to medium. A half-inch steak will be grey through in that time; three to four minutes a side is nearer the mark. Judge by an internal reading of 130-135F for medium-rare rather than by the clock.
- "Arrange on the broiler"At the time this meant a hinged wire gridiron over coals or the rack of a gas broiler, with heat coming from above or below and fat dripping clear. A ridged cast-iron grill pan or an outdoor grill reproduces the result better than a modern oven broiler, which tends to steam the meat in its own juices.
- Season and restA teaspoon of salt across three steaks is modest by current practice; salt them at least twenty minutes ahead so it penetrates. Rest the cooked steaks five minutes before saucing, or the juices will thin the Bordelaise on the platter.
- OilThe teaspoon of oil is there to keep the meat from sticking to the bars and to help it colour. Use something that takes high heat; unrefined olive oil may smoke at broiler temperature.
- YieldThree steaks of that size serve three generously, or four if you carve the meat off the bone and fan it under the sauce.
Bordelaise takes its name from Bordeaux and its character from that region's red wine, reduced with shallots into a brown sauce that Escoffier codified as one of the standard small sauces of the classic repertoire; the marrow-enriched version, sauce bordelaise u00e0 la moelle, is often said to have been common in restaurants of the early twentieth century. That a book of this period pairs it with lamb rather than the more usual beef entrecôte is characteristic of the way American cookbooks borrowed the French sauce vocabulary and applied it broadly, treating a named sauce as a finish that could dignify almost any grilled meat. The instruction to "procure" steaks from a tender leg also reflects a time when the reader dealt with a butcher who cut to order, rather than choosing from a case.