Home › The World's Kitchen › Mironton of Lamb, Paysanne
Mironton of Lamb, Paysanne
Detach all meat from the leg of lamb left over from yesterday and cut into half-inch square slices. Cut in the same way half the quantity peeled boiled potatoes. Heat two tablespoons lard in a saucepan, adding two finely sliced white onions, and fry to a nice light brown; add two tablespoons flour, mix well, then add the lamb and potatoes. Moisten with a half gill vinegar and a pint white broth add two peeled and crushed red tomatoes, one finely chopped bean garlic, one teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, one teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Mix well while heating for two minutes. Cover the pan, set it in the oven for fifty-five minutes, remove, pour into a deep dish and serve.
A leftover-lamb braise built on a brown onion roux sharpened with vinegar — the French miroton treatment applied to yesterday's roast. Two things need attention: the vinegar, and the fact that everything in the pan is already cooked.
- Half a gill of vinegarA gill is half a cup, so a half gill is 2 fl oz — a quarter cup (by the imperial gill of 5 fl oz, a shade more). Use a mild wine vinegar; a modern distilled vinegar at 5 percent acidity will dominate a pint of stock. Add it to the roux and let it bubble away for a minute before the broth goes in.
- White brothA light unbrowned stock — veal or chicken. A pint (2 cups) against 2 tablespoons each of fat and flour gives a loose gravy that thickens further as the potatoes shed starch in the oven.
- Bean garlicA clove. Probably a literal rendering of the French gousse d'ail, gousse meaning a pod or husk.
- Oven heatNone is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, covered, suits what is essentially a reheating; anything hotter risks reducing the sauce past the point of pouring.
- Fifty-five minutes is a long timeThe lamb is roasted and the potatoes are boiled, so nothing needs cooking — the time is there to let the onion, tomato and vinegar marry. Thirty to forty minutes gets you the same flavour with the potato cubes still holding their edges. Check that the sauce has not gone dry.
- ProportionsThe recipe measures by what is left over. Reckon on about a pound to a pound and a half of picked lamb and half that volume of potato; yield will depend on the joint, but that quantity suits an ordinary saucepan and roughly four servings.
- Red tomatoesRipe ones, peeled and crushed — two medium, or about a cup of canned crushed tomatoes out of season. They are seasoning here, not the body of the sauce.
- LardStill the best choice for the flavour of the browned onion, but butter or the fat skimmed from yesterday's roasting pan works. The onions want a genuine light brown before the flour goes in; that colour, with the tomatoes, is most of what the sauce has.
Miroton (Filippini's "mironton" is a variant spelling) is a French domestic dish rather than a restaurant one: cold boiled or roasted meat sliced up and reheated in a brown onion sauce cut with vinegar, close cousin to bœuf miroton and to the Lyonnaise and Soubise family of onion preparations. The vinegar does the work of reviving meat that has already given its best juices to another meal. Paysanne — peasant-style — here signals the potatoes. Alexander Filippini was long of Delmonico's, and recipes of his like this one routinely open with a phrase such as "left over from yesterday," assuming a cook working through a joint across several days.