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Spring Lamb Steaks, Bretonne
Prepare and keep hot the same amount of beans.
Procure three three-quarter-pound steaks from a leg of tender spring lamb. Make a few incisions all around the skin and season all over with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, add the steaks, one beside another, and fry for six minutes on each side. Remove the steaks, dress the beans on a large dish and arrange the steaks over. Pour a gill of tomato sauce in the pan in which the steaks were cooked, add half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, lightly mix, boil for five minutes, then pour over the steaks and serve.
A pan-fried leg steak on a bed of white beans, with a quick pan sauce built in the drippings. The one thing the text withholds is the beans themselves, which belong to the preceding recipe in the book.
- "The same amount of beans"Bretonne here indicates dried white haricot beans, simmered until tender and finished with onion, butter and a little tomato; flageolets or cannellini will stand in. For three steaks allow roughly half a pound of dried beans cooked, or two 15-oz tins drained and warmed through with sauteed onion.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. Tomato sauce here means a plain cooked tomato sauce or thin tomato puree, not the sweetened ketchup-style bottled sauce.
- The incisionsScoring the rim of fat and connective tissue at intervals is what keeps the steak flat in the pan. Skip it and the edges contract and the centre lifts off the metal.
- Butter alone will burnOne tablespoon of butter under three large steaks over the heat needed to brown them will darken well before the twelve minutes are up. Add an equal amount of a neutral oil, or clarify the butter first.
- Six minutes a sideTwelve minutes in the pan will usually carry an inch-thick leg steak to medium or beyond. If you want it nearer 145-150F at the centre, go by an instant-read thermometer rather than the clock; thinner supermarket-cut steaks will be there in half the time.
- Rest while the sauce cooksThe five minutes the tomato sauce spends boiling down in the pan is the resting period for the meat. Sit the steaks somewhere warm rather than straight onto the beans, or the juices run into them before the sauce arrives.
- Parsley timingHalf a teaspoon of chopped parsley boiled for five minutes contributes almost nothing. Stir it in at the end, off the heat, and use more — a tablespoon.
- YieldThree steaks, three servings, generous ones. Leg steaks cut this heavy usually need ordering from a butcher.
A la bretonne is one of the fixed garnishes of the French classical repertoire: white haricot beans, stewed with onion and tomato, served under or beside roast or grilled mutton and lamb. The name is often traced, by tradition rather than documentation, to Brittany's reputation for dried beans and to an older Breton habit of raising sheep on coastal pasture, and the pairing of a leg of lamb with a dish of white beans is old enough in French cooking that Escoffier could list it simply as a name. Books like this one moved such garnishes out of the professional brigade and into domestic use, hence the decision to cross-refer to the beans from the previous page rather than repeat them, and the substitution of a quick pan of leg steaks for a whole roasted gigot.