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Lamb Steaks, Colbert
Cut three nice steaks of three-quarters of a pound each from a tender leg of lamb. Make a few light incisions around the skin of each, evenly season with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter or lard in a frying pan, place the steaks one beside another in pan and gently fry eight minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish. Pour a sauce Colbert over the steaks and serve.
A plain pan-fried lamb steak whose whole character rests on the sauce, which the book prints elsewhere. Two things need attention: the sauce itself, and a cooking time set for the well-done lamb of 1900.
- Sauce ColbertThe recipe assumes you already have it. Colbert is a maître d'hôtel butter enriched with meat glaze — softened butter worked with lemon juice, chopped parsley and tarragon, salt and pepper, then let down with a spoonful of reduced veal or lamb stock and sometimes a little Madeira. It is melted over the hot meat rather than cooked as a sauce, so keep it below a simmer or it will split.
- The cutSteaks cut from a leg of lamb, about 3/4 lb each, which would be roughly an inch thick; cut across the leg they would carry bone. Ask a butcher for leg steaks or lamb sirloin chops; a supermarket "lamb steak" is often thinner and will overcook at these times.
- "The skin"This is the fell and the rim of fat and silverskin around the outside. The light incisions are score marks to stop the steak curling as the connective tissue contracts. Cut through the fat band every inch or so, not into the meat.
- Sixteen minutes is a long timeEight minutes a side on an inch-thick leg steak takes it well past grey. For medium-rare, four to five minutes a side over medium-high heat, pulling at 130–135F on an instant-read thermometer; leg is lean and turns dry and livery when cooked through.
- Fat and panA tablespoon and a half of butter alone can brown and begin to burn before the steaks are properly seared. Use clarified butter, or half butter and half neutral oil, in a heavy cast-iron or steel pan. Lard, the book's alternative, works well and has the higher smoke point.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper across three steaks is about right — roughly a third of a teaspoon of salt each. Season at least fifteen minutes ahead so it penetrates.
- Resting and servingRest the steaks five minutes on the warmed dish before the sauce goes over, or the juices will thin it. Three steaks of this size serve three generously, or four if the lamb is carved off the bone onto plates.
Sauce Colbert takes its name from Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister, one of a set of nineteenth-century French garnishes and sauces named after statesmen and courtiers rather than after anything in the pot; the attribution is culinary tradition, not documented invention by or for the man. In classical practice it is little more than maître d'hôtel butter given depth with meat glaze and tarragon, and it belongs to the family of compound butters that let a restaurant kitchen finish a grilled or fried cut to order in seconds. That is exactly how it appears here: the meat is cooked as plainly as possible and the sauce does the work. The book's habit of naming a preparation and assuming the reader will look up its sauce elsewhere is typical of the professional French repertoire it was drawing on, translated for American households that were being taught to cook, and to order dinner, by the language of the restaurant menu.