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Mignons of Mutton, Porto Sauce
Neatly flatten six four-ounce mignon steaks cut from a leg of tender mutton. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Thoroughly heat a tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, add the mignons and cook for four minutes on each side. Remove, dress on six freshly prepared round toasts, pour a port wine sauce over and serve.
A four-line recipe that depends entirely on the cut and on the sauce it does not describe. Get a proper thick medallion and the rest is a matter of minutes in a pan.
- What a mignon of mutton isA small round steak, here 4 oz, cut across the muscle of the leg — essentially the same trimming logic as filet mignon applied to a leg. Ask a butcher for boneless leg steaks about 3/4 inch thick, or cut them yourself from a boned leg and flatten lightly to an even thickness so they cook at the same rate.
- Mutton or lambTrue mutton — sheep generally over a year or two old — is stronger and firmer than lamb and is now mostly found through halal butchers and specialist farms. Boneless leg of lamb is the ordinary substitute and needs no change in method, though the flavour is much milder.
- The pan and the fatA tablespoon of butter alone will brown and burn at the heat needed to sear six steaks. Use clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, and cook in two batches rather than crowding the pan.
- Four minutes a sideOn a 3/4-inch medallion that is likely to give medium to medium-well rather than a rosy centre; if you want it at medium, expect somewhere around 140F and check early. Leg meat cooked much past medium goes dry and mealy, so an instant-read thermometer is worth more here than the clock.
- Rest the meatThe original sends the steaks straight from pan to toast. Two or three minutes on a warm plate first keeps the juices in the meat rather than in the bread.
- The port sauceThe recipe gives no formula for it; in books of this kind the sauce is usually set out elsewhere, in a sauce chapter. A standard modern version: soften a chopped shallot in butter, add about a cup of port, reduce by half, add a cup of brown stock or demi-glace, reduce to a coating consistency and finish off the heat with cold butter.
- The toastsCut rounds slightly wider than the steaks from firm white bread and fry or toast them just before serving, so they hold the sauce for a moment before softening. Stale, dry toast collapses at once.
- Yield and seasoningSix mignons, one per person as a main course with a vegetable. A full teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper for six steaks is reasonable, but season the meat rather than the pan, and taste the sauce before adding more.
"Mignon" simply means small and dainty, and in cookery of this period the term had spread well beyond beef fillet: kitchens cut mignons of veal, of lamb and, as here, of mutton, trading on the prestige of the word to sell a modest cut. Mutton was still an everyday meat in Britain, and a leg could be broken down into steaks rather than roasted whole. Port reduced into a brown sauce is a familiar restaurant treatment for strong red meat, sweet and sharp enough to stand up to the muscular flavour of an older sheep. The croûte of toast beneath was a common feature of service in this style, meant to catch the sauce and lift the meat off the plate, and it survives today mainly in dishes like tournedos.