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Ragout of Lamb, Solferino
Cut a neck of lamb into pieces one and a half inches square. Heat in a saucepan two tablespoons oil, add the lamb with a tablespoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper and briskly brown for ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Add two tablespoons flour, stir well, moisten with one pint white broth or hot water, half pint tomato sauce, one gill demi-glace and one gill claret. Mix well, cover the pan and boil for ten minutes. Scoop out two medium carrots and two turnips with a small Parisian potato scoop and add to the stew. Tie in a bunch two leeks, two branches celery, two branches parsley, one sprig thyme and one sprig bay leaf and place in the stew, adding also a quarter of the dried rind of a lime. Cover the pan and gently cook for twenty minutes. Peel ten small, sound white onions and add to the stew. Cook for ten minutes longer. Scoop out all you can of two medium, peeled raw potatoes and add to the pan, then cook again for fifteen minutes. Remove the bunch of herbs, add three tablespoons canned green peas, lightly mix, skim the fat from the surface of the ragout, pour into a hot dish and serve.
A classic French-style brown ragout dressed up with turned vegetables. Two things need attention before you start: the salt and the cooking time.
- The salt is far too muchThe salt is heavy -- A tablespoon of salt, on top of tomato sauce, demi-glace and broth, is more than most palates will want. Use about a teaspoon at the browning stage and correct at the end, once the sauce has reduced.
- Total cooking time is shortThe recipe's simmering stages add up to about 55 minutes, 65 including the ten-minute browning. Lamb neck is collagen-rich and generally wants 1.5 to 2 hours to become tender. Brown the meat, add the liquids, and give it an hour before the carrots and turnips go in; stage the onions, potatoes and peas in the last 30 minutes as written.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. So a cup of liquid total between the demi-glace and the claret.
- White brothAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock. Any good unsalted chicken stock stands in. Demi-glace is reduced brown veal stock; a spoonful of commercial demi-glace concentrate or a very reduced beef stock covers it, and if you omit it, reduce the finished sauce a little further instead.
- Parisian potato scoopA melon baller. The carrots, turnips and potatoes are cut into small spheres so they cook evenly and look uniform, which is the whole point of the garnish. The recipe says nothing about the trimmings; they are better kept for stock than dropped in the pot, where scraps would break down.
- Dried lime rindA quarter of the dried peel of a lime. The recipe does not say to take it out, though it can be lifted with the herbs. Pared fresh zest, in a strip, gives a similar lift.
- Sprig of bay leafRead this as one bay leaf, tied into the bouquet with the leeks, celery, parsley and thyme so it can be lifted out cleanly.
- Potatoes cooked in the sauceAdding them directly means their starch thickens the ragout. If you want the sauce to stay glossy, cook the potato balls separately in salted water and fold them in at the end.
- YieldA neck of lamb, roughly 3 lb bone-in, with this much vegetable feeds four generously. Skim the fat properly; a neck throws a good deal.
Solferino was a battle fought in northern Italy in June 1859, in which French and Sardinian forces defeated the Austrians, and its name attached itself to a good many things in the years afterward: a magenta-purple dye colour, streets in Paris, and in the kitchen a garnish of small turned or scooped vegetables in a tomato-tinted sauce. Naming garnishes after battles, generals and opera singers was standard practice in nineteenth-century French cookery, and the code was expected to be legible to any professional cook, which is why books of this kind print the name without explanation. The dish itself is an ordinary brown ragout of a cheap cut, raised in status by the labour of scooping every vegetable into balls with a Parisian scoop, the sort of work a well-staffed hotel kitchen could afford and a domestic cook generally could not.