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Noisettes of Lamb, St. Germain
Cut from a leg of lamb six four-ounce pieces, neatly flatten, season all around with a light teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Place an ounce butter in a black frying pan, and when light brown add noisettes one beside another, gently cook for four minutes on each side, remove and keep hot. Dress a puree of peas in centre of a hot dish pyramid-like, arrange noisettes around, pour a gill hot demi-glace over noisettes and serve.
A plain hotel-kitchen sauté that depends on two things being ready before the meat hits the pan: a hot heavy skillet and a finished demi-glace. The lamb takes eight minutes total, so the sauce and the pea purée must be waiting, not the other way round.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "two saltspoons pepper" is half a teaspoon. A "light teaspoon" of salt is presumably a level or slightly scant one rather than heaped.
- GillA gill is half a cup, four fluid ounces, spread over six noisettes. That is a coating of sauce rather than a pool.
- Black frying panCast iron or heavy carbon steel, meaning a pan that holds heat when six cold pieces of meat go in at once. A thin nonstick pan will not brown these properly.
- Noisettes from the legNoisettes are commonly cut from the boned loin or rack today. From a leg you want the thick end of the top round, trimmed of sinew, cut into six 4 oz medallions and pressed fairly thin.
- Timing and donenessFour minutes a side in browned butter is a long time for a flattened 4 oz medallion and will likely take it to medium or beyond. Lamb leg is lean and goes grey and dry past that, so pull the pan earlier if your pieces are thinner than the recipe assumes.
- Demi-glaceThe book assumes a stockpot demi-glace on hand: brown veal stock reduced with espagnole. A good commercial demi-glace concentrate, or lamb stock reduced hard with a splash of red wine, does the same job here.
- Puree of peasThe St. Germain garnish is peas cooked soft, passed through a sieve and dried out over heat with butter until it is stiff enough to hold the pyramid shape. A loose, watery purée will slump into the sauce.
- YieldSix 4 oz noisettes serves three as a main course, or six as one course of a longer meal; the recipe itself gives no yield.
The suffix St. Germain is one of the fixed garnish names of classical French service, and it means green peas — usually a purée, sometimes peas with lettuce and small glazed onions. The name is generally traced either to the Comte de Saint-Germain, war minister under Louis XVI, or simply to Saint-Germain-en-Laye outside Paris, where market gardens supplied the capital's early peas; neither attribution is firmly documented. Noisette means hazelnut, used of a small round trimmed medallion of lamb or mutton about that size. A dish written this tersely, with weights per portion and a set garnish name, reads as restaurant shorthand rather than home cooking: the reader is expected to already keep demi-glace, and the entry is effectively an assembly note for a cook who knows the components.