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Mignons of Lamb, Ham Sauce
Neatly flatten and trim six small steaks, cut from a tender leg of lamb. Season all around with a teaspoon salt and half a teaspoon pepper. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, add the mignons, one beside another, and gently cook them for five minutes on each side. Prepare six round pieces of toast, quarter-inch thick and same size as the mignons, dress on a hot dish, place the mignons over the toast, pour a ham sauce over and serve.
A plain sauté of lamb medallions, written for a kitchen that already had a stockpot of brown sauce going. The one thing the recipe leaves out is the sauce itself, which lives elsewhere in the book.
- The sauce is the missing half"A ham sauce" in a book of this vintage would normally mean a brown sauce (espagnole or demi-glace) finished with finely chopped or shredded cooked ham; some versions add a splash of madeira or sherry. Have it made and hot before the lamb goes into the pan; the meat will not wait.
- Cutting the mignonsSteaks from a boned leg, trimmed of silverskin and flattened lightly with the side of a cleaver; the tenderer muscles of the leg suit this best. About 3/4 inch thick and 3 oz each is a workable size, though the original gives no thickness; thinner cuts will be overdone long before ten minutes are up.
- Five minutes a sideThat timing suits a thick medallion in a moderately hot pan and lands well past pink. For 3/4-inch medallions, 2 to 3 minutes per side over medium-high heat brings them to medium-rare to medium. Lamb leg is lean and turns dry and grey quickly.
- Salt and pepperA full teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper across six small steaks is on the heavy side for modern taste, particularly with a salty ham sauce over the top. Season to about half that and correct at the table.
- Butter aloneOne and a half tablespoons of butter in a hot pan will brown and can scorch before the meat colours. Adding a teaspoon of neutral oil, or clarifying the butter, raises the smoke point, though clarified butter loses some of the browned-milk flavour.
- The toastQuarter-inch rounds cut with a cutter to match the meat, dried and browned. Their job is to absorb sauce and juices; toast them until genuinely crisp or they collapse into paste under the sauce.
- YieldSix medallions serves three as a main course, or six as a first course. The book assumes a plated course in a longer meal.
"Mignon" simply means small and dainty in French, and by the late nineteenth century it is often said to have settled into professional kitchen usage as the name for a neat round medallion of tender meat — filet mignon being the survivor that everyone still recognises. Serving such medallions on a matched croûte of fried or toasted bread was standard restaurant practice: the bread lifted the meat clear of the plate, caught the sauce, and gave the cook a way to keep the arrangement tidy under service. The pairing of lamb with a ham-flavoured brown sauce belongs to the same logic as garnishing mutton with anchovy or with cured pork — a salty, savoury counterweight to the meat. Books of this period, aimed at cooks working from a repertoire rather than a single page, routinely named a sauce without repeating it, on the assumption that the reader would turn to the sauce chapter and find it there.