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Shoulder of Lamb, Montmorency
Remove blade bone from a tender, small shoulder of lamb and cut the end bone off one inch from first joint. Season all over with teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg, place in small roasting pan, baste with a little melted butter, pour two tablespoons water in the pan, then set in oven to roast for forty-five minutes, being careful to turn and baste once in a while. Arrange Montmorency vegetables on a large hot dish, place shoulder over vegetables, pour a gill hot demi-glace and sprinkle a little freshly chopped parsley over all and serve.
Filippini assumes a cook who knows what a Montmorency garnish is and what temperature a roasting oven runs at. Neither is stated, so both need filling in.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, so any figure is a modern guess: a hot start of around 425F for the first fifteen minutes to colour, then 350F for the remainder, will bring a boned shoulder of roughly 3 lb to pink within the forty-five minutes the recipe allows.
- Buy it boned and tiedBuy it boned -- Removing the blade bone from a shoulder cleanly is fiddly; a butcher will do it in a minute. Trimming the shank an inch past the first joint is presumably for the look of it on the platter, though Filippini does not say why.
- Doneness, not the clockLamb shoulder is fatty and forgiving, but 45 minutes is a fast roast, not a braise. Pull it at 130-135F internal for pink, 145F for medium, and rest it 10 minutes before carving so the juices settle.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, so the demi-glace amount is 4 fl oz poured over the whole dish.
- The two tablespoons of waterThat splash is there to keep the drippings from scorching in a small pan, not to steam the meat. Top it up if the pan runs dry, and use those pan juices to loosen the demi-glace.
- Montmorency vegetablesIn classic garnish nomenclature this means carrots as the leading element, usually turned or cut in small shapes and glazed, often set in or alongside artichoke bottoms with peas. Nothing in the dish involves cherries, despite the town's other claim to fame.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole (brown stock thickened with a brown roux) reduced down with more brown stock, once a standing item in any professional kitchen. Good jarred or frozen demi-glace is sold now; a well-reduced brown lamb or veal stock, mounted with a little butter, does the same job.
- YieldA small shoulder, boned, serves four generously with the vegetables.
Alexander Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) reads like a professional's index rather than a home manual: hundreds of short entries, each assuming the reader already commands the base preparations. The name here follows the French garnish system, in which a dish is identified not by its main ingredient but by what surrounds it. Montmorency, a town just north of Paris, lends its name to two quite different things in the kitchen: a variety of sour cherry used with duck and in pastry, and a savoury garnish built on carrots, generally traced to the same nineteenth-century French repertoire that gave us Clamart for peas and Crecy for carrot soups. Filippini means the second, and he expects no explanation to be necessary, which tells you something about who he thought was reading.