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Ribs of Lamb with New Potatoes
Saw off the spiny parts, pare and neatly trim a tender rack of lamb. Season all around with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, and place it in a roasting pan with twelve even-sized, peeled, raw Bermuda potatoes. Season the potatoes with half teaspoon salt, spread one tablespoon melted butter over lamb and potatoes, add a bean of peeled garlic and one sliced onion to the pan. Set in oven to roast for forty minutes, turning and basting both lamb and potatoes quite frequently. Pour in a gill demi-glace, half gill tomato sauce, one tablespoon sherry, and replace in oven for ten minutes more. Remove, dress lamb on a large dish, arrange potatoes around, skim fat from gravy, boil for five minutes, then strain over and sprinkle a little freshly chopped parsley on lamb and potatoes and serve.
A straightforward rack of lamb roasted with potatoes in the same pan, finished with a quick pan sauce. The only real translation needed is in the units, the oven setting the original assumes, and the doneness.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe names none. A hot oven, in the region of 425F, is a reasonable modern reading, though the book gives no setting to check it against. Forty minutes at that heat with frequent turning suits a rack of about 1½ to 2 lb; the extra ten minutes after the liquid goes in brings the total to fifty.
- Doneness, not the clockA modern trimmed rack will be medium-rare at 125-130F in the thickest part of the meat and well past that by 145F. Pull it when the thermometer says so and let it rest while the sauce boils down, rather than following the fifty minutes blindly.
- A gillHalf a cup. So 1/2 cup demi-glace and 1/4 cup tomato sauce, plus a tablespoon of sherry.
- "Saw off the spiny parts"Removing the chine bone and trimming the rib tips. Any butcher will do this on request, and many racks are sold already frenched, in which case the step is done for you.
- "A bean of garlic"One peeled clove. It is meant to perfume the pan drippings, not the meat directly, and it will scorch if the pan runs dry; keep it under the potatoes.
- Bermuda potatoesSmall, mild, thin-skinned new potatoes. Any waxy new potato of roughly golf-ball size works; twelve should all be the same size or they will not finish together.
- Demi-glaceSold in tubs and concentrated pots now, which is a fair substitute. A strong reduced brown stock does the same job; a thin bouillon will not, since the sauce depends on the demi-glace for body.
- Skim, then boilThe five-minute boil after skimming is what turns pan liquid into gravy. Skim first, or you emulsify the lamb fat back in and the sauce turns cloudy and greasy.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many ribs the rack carries; a typical eight-rib rack with twelve potatoes serves three or four, depending on whether you count two ribs or three to a plate.
This is restaurant cooking written down for the home, which is what most of The International Cook Book amounts to: Alexander Filippini is generally associated with the kitchens of New York's Delmonico's, and the tell is the demi-glace. A household cook in 1906 had no tub of it, but a hotel kitchen had gallons standing by, and dishes in this book are finished with a ladle of it plus a splash of tomato sauce and wine. The Bermuda potato was a genuine commercial item of the period rather than a vague description, shipped into East Coast ports from the islands early in the season and prized for arriving before the domestic new crop. Roasting meat and potatoes in one pan so the potatoes take up the drippings is far older than either, and the frequent turning and basting the recipe insists on is the whole method: no fat is added beyond a single tablespoon, so the potatoes brown in what the lamb gives off.