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Lamb Steaks, Luxembourgeoise
Cut three steaks, three-quarters of a pound each, from a tender leg of lamb, make a few light incisions around the skin of each and neatly flatten them. Season with a light teaspoon salt and keep on a plate until required. Cut four peeled Bermuda onions in halves crosswise, place on a baking dish, cut side upward, season with a light teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Place in a bowl an ounce butter, two tablespoons bred crumbs, a half teaspoon chopped parsley, half teaspoon chopped chives, the juice of a half lemon and half teaspoon French mustard, mix the whole well together, then evenly spread over the onions. Set in the oven for twenty minutes, heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, arrange the steaks in and cook for eight minutes on one side only, then lay the steaks on top of the onions, the cooked side downward. Pour one-half gill cold water in the steak pan, boil on the range for two minutes, then pour the gravy over the steaks. Set in the oven for ten minutes, remove and serve in the same dish.
A straightforward leg-of-lamb dish that works as a one-pan supper, provided the onions get a real head start. The original assumes a coal range and gives no temperature, so the oven setting is the first thing to fix.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. Treat this as a moderately hot oven, around 400F, for both the onion roasting and the final ten minutes. Below that the halved onions will not soften in twenty minutes.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup, four tablespoons. It is only there to deglaze the pan; add it off the heat, scrape, then boil down for the two minutes given.
- Bermuda onionsLarge, mild, flat-ish sweet onions. Vidalia, Walla Walla or any large sweet onion is a good substitute; a standard yellow onion will work but be sharper and slower to soften.
- French mustardDijon, smooth and not sweet, not the bright yellow American kind. Half a teaspoon in the crumb mixture is a seasoning, not a flavour statement.
- "Bred crumbs"A typesetting slip for bread crumbs. Use dry fine crumbs rather than fresh, so the topping crisps rather than steams under the meat juices.
- The onions need longer than the recipe impliesTwenty minutes at 400F leaves thick onion halves still firm at the core. Give them thirty to forty minutes before the lamb goes on, or slice them no more than an inch thick.
- Cooking the steaksEight minutes on one side in a frying pan is a hard sear on 3/4-lb leg steaks; use a heavy pan over medium-high heat and expect the second side to finish in the oven. Ten minutes at 400F brings them to roughly medium; pull at 130-135F internal for medium-rare.
- The incisionsCutting through the rim of fat and silverskin stops the steak curling in the pan. Cut through the membrane every inch or so, not into the meat.
- YieldThree steaks of 3/4 lb each and four onions serve three generously, or four if the steaks are divided and the onions counted as the vegetable.
The dish comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), a vast compilation by a cook long associated with Delmonico's in New York, arranged to give an American household a nominal tour of the world's kitchens. Names like Luxembourgeoise in books of this kind rarely denote a documented regional recipe; in professional French garnish nomenclature a national or provincial tag usually flags a characteristic ingredient, and here one might guess at the onions, the mustard and the crumb topping, though the connection is inference rather than record. Bermuda onions themselves were a genuine import story of the era, shipped to eastern American ports from the islands in late winter and prized for their mildness. The technique, searing on one side only and finishing the meat over its own vegetable so the juices run down into it, may well have recommended itself as restaurant economy: one dish to the oven, one dish to the table.