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Ribs of Lamb, Aux Racines
Procure three pounds rack of lamb. Season it well with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and rub in the seasoning all around. Cover the surface with thin slices of larding pork, tie it around, lay in a small roasting tin, pour in two tablespoons water, then set in a brisk oven for fifteen minutes. Remove and transfer to a small braising pan, scoop out with a very small scoop from a large, well-scraped carrot and a turnip all you can and add to the pan. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, add twelve very small, peeled white onions, gently brown for ten minutes, drain and add to the lamb. Tie in a bunch and add two branches parsley, one clove garlic, one bay leaf, one clove; place the pan on the fire, pour in a half gill white wine and let reduce for ten minutes, then pour in one gill demi-glace and one gill water. Cover the pan and set in the oven for forty minutes. Remove, untie, dress the lamb on a large dish, take up the bunch of herbs, pour all the contents of the pan over the lamb and serve.
A rack of lamb given the old braising treatment: seared hot, then finished slowly with root vegetables in wine and brown sauce. Two things need translating before you start — the liquid measures and the demi-glace.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. So a half gill of white wine is 1/4 cup, and a gill each of demi-glace and water is 1/2 cup each — about 1 1/4 cups of liquid in total for a 3 lb rack in a snug pan.
- Brisk ovenBrisk means hot; reckon on about 400-425F. That first fifteen minutes is a sear to set the surface and render the pork fat, not a cooking stage. For the forty-minute braise that follows, drop the heat to around 325-350F, covered.
- Larding porkThin sheets of fresh pork back fat, tied over the meat — barding, not larding, despite the name. Fatback or unsmoked salt pork sliced thin works; sheet caul fat is the easiest modern substitute. Smoked bacon will dominate the sauce.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown veal stock with sauce espagnole, the backbone of the classical sauce kitchen. A good jarred demi-glace or a well-reduced homemade brown stock both serve; a bouillon cube will not, since the whole sauce here is only a cup of liquid and has nowhere to hide.
- The scoopA parisienne or melon baller, cutting pea-to-marble-sized spheres from carrot and turnip. Purely visual — the trimmings are worth simmering into stock rather than discarding. If you skip the balling, cut even 1/2-inch dice so they cook at the same rate as the onions.
- One cloveThe recipe means one single clove (the spice) tied into the herb bundle, and separately one clove of garlic. Both go in the bouquet and both come out before serving.
- DonenessForty minutes covered after a hot sear will bring a rack well past pink; this is a braise, not a roast, and the recipe as written gives no sign of aiming for rare meat. If you want it at 130-135F in the centre, pull the rack after about 20 minutes and let the vegetables and sauce finish without it.
- YieldThree pounds of rack, bone-in, serves three or four. Carve between the ribs at the table and spoon the vegetables and reduced sauce over.
Aux racines is simply "with roots" — the French kitchen's shorthand for a garnish of turnip and carrot cut to a uniform shape, here balled out with a parisienne scoop and set off by small onions. The technique of searing a joint hard, then finishing it slowly in a covered pan with wine, demi-glace and a tied bouquet, belongs to the classical professional repertoire, and the fact that the recipe assumes a cook has demi-glace on hand tells you what kind of kitchen it was written for: one with a stockpot going. Books like this one carried that hotel-kitchen vocabulary — braising pan, bouquet, larding pork, gills — into American domestic use. The barding fat, now largely dropped, mattered more when ovens were less even.