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Noisettes of Mutton, Favorite
Procure six four-ounce pieces mutton from leg, pare nicely to a small, round shape, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Finely chop one small white onion, place it in frying pan with one ounce butter, set pan on fire and toss until a light brown, then arrange noisettes in pan and cook for three minutes on each side. Remove, place on six freshly prepared toasts one and a half inches in diameter and one-third inch thick, arrange them on a round dish crown-like, dress same amount of Palois string beans in centre, pyramid-like, pour a Colbert sauce over noisettes and serve very hot.
A short, briskly written restaurant plate: six small rounds of leg meat, seared in butter and set on toast with a butter sauce. Most of the work is in the two French terms the recipe leaves undefined.
- Colbert sauceNot explained here because a professional kitchen of the period had it on hand. Sauce Colbert is a meat glaze or reduced brown stock finished off the heat with butter, lemon juice and chopped tarragon, sometimes with a spoonful of madeira. Keep it below a simmer once the butter goes in or it will split.
- Palois string beansA la paloise points to Pau in the Bearn (as in sauce paloise). The term is obscure enough that no single authoritative version survives, so treat it as buttered haricots verts.
- MuttonMutton means sheep over about two years old, with a strong flavour and firmer grain; it is a special-order item in most places now. Leg of lamb cut into 4 oz rounds behaves the same in the pan but tastes considerably milder.
- Cutting the noisettesFour ounces each, pared round, means a piece roughly two to two and a half inches across and an inch or more thick. Cut across the grain from the boned leg muscles and tie a turn of string round each if they want to slump.
- Three minutes a sideRight for an inch-thick round in a hot pan, giving pink centres at 130-135F. Leg meat is lean and turns dry and grey well before it turns tender, so this is one old timing that needs no lengthening.
- The onionThe chopped onion browned in the butter first is there to flavour the fat, not to be served. Watch it once the meat goes in, as six minutes more over high heat will take it past brown to bitter; lift it out if it darkens.
- The toastsRounds an inch and a half across and a third of an inch thick, cut with a cutter from dense white bread. Fried in butter rather than dry-toasted they hold up better under the sauce.
- YieldSix noisettes, so three main courses or six small plates. Have the beans, toasts and sauce finished before the meat goes in the pan; nothing here reheats well.
Noisette is French for hazelnut, borrowed by nineteenth-century cooks for any small, neatly rounded nut of meat trimmed from the loin or, as here, the leg. The dish belongs to the grand-hotel style codified in Escoffier's generation: a garnish named for a French locality, a classical compound butter sauce, individual portions raised on croûtons and set out in a ring with vegetables pyramided in the middle. Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, wrote for readers who were expected to know what a Colbert sauce was without being told, which is why the instructions here are almost entirely about assembly. The reliance on mutton is the clearest period marker: mature mutton is generally said to have been ordinary butcher's meat around the turn of the twentieth century in a way it has not been in English-speaking countries since the middle of that century.