Home › The World's Kitchen › Noisette of Lamb, Sauce Bearnaise
Noisette of Lamb, Sauce Bearnaise
Procure six small, round pieces of three ounces each, cut from a tender leg of lamb, neatly flatten and trim all around. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Place half ounce butter in a black frying pan, and when it obtains a nice light brown add the noisettes, one beside another, and cook for four minutes on each side. Remove, arrange a hot Bearnaise sauce on a not dish; dress the noisettes over crown-like and serve.
A straightforward sauté of lamb medallions whose success rests almost entirely on the sauce, which is written here as though the cook already knows how to make it. Sort the béarnaise out first, then cook the meat.
- Béarnaise is the hingeThe recipe assumes you have a hot béarnaise standing by. Hold it in a bowl over warm, not simmering, water at around 130-140F; much above 160F the egg yolk begins to set and the emulsion can break, and once it cools it is awkward to bring back while the lamb rests.
- What a noisette isA small round of boneless meat, trimmed of fat and sinew, tied or pressed into a neat disc. Six pieces of three ounces from a boned leg means a leg section cut across the muscle; a modern butcher will more often give you loin medallions, which behave the same in the pan.
- "A black frying pan"Cast iron or a black-iron (carbon steel) skillet, valued then for holding heat rather than for any coating. Any heavy pan that will take a hard preheat works; a thin nonstick pan will not brown the meat in the time given.
- Butter to light brownHalf an ounce is one tablespoon, and it must reach noisette colour before the meat goes in. Butter alone at that heat is close to burning, so add a teaspoon of neutral oil if your pan runs hot, and do not crowd the six pieces.
- Four minutes a sideEight minutes total is a long time for a three-ounce medallion; on anything under about three-quarters of an inch it will cook well past pink. Judge by an instant-read thermometer rather than the clock - around 130-135F for pink - and rest the meat a few minutes off the heat.
- SeasoningA full teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of white pepper across eighteen ounces of lamb is on the generous side by current taste. Season both faces just before the meat meets the butter.
- "A not dish"A typesetter's slip for hot dish. Warm the platter properly: béarnaise on a cold plate cools below the point where it stays glossy and will begin to separate at the edges.
- YieldSix noisettes serve three as a main course or six as a small plate. Classic accompaniments are pommes château or a plain green vegetable, nothing that competes with the sauce.
The noisette, literally "little nut," is restaurant-kitchen language: a small trimmed round of lamb, cut and shaped so that six of them plate identically, the sort of standardisation often associated with the French professional brigade. Béarnaise, a tarragon-and-shallot reduction finished into an egg-and-butter emulsion, is generally traced to the Pavillon Henri IV at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the 1830s, the name nodding to Henri IV's native Béarn rather than to any dish from that region. Pairing the two was a fixture of the grand-hotel repertoire. The instructions are terse, a habit of compression typical of chef-authored compilations.