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Epigrammes of Lamb
(A famous French entree.) Pare, season, and fry 4 lamb chops. Dip each in crumbs and broil. Take a breast of lamb, cooked in broth, remove the bones and cut it into 8 pieces. Dip each into cold Bechamel or stock made of chicken, then in crumbs and fry brown. Arrange these two alternately, chops and cutlets, overlapping, in a circle, and fill the centre with green peas, string beans, and asparagus tips, cooked, a cupful of each, and pour around a good sauce made of milk or stock, herbs, etc., as convenient.
FRICANDEAU OF VEAL (invented by the cook of Leo X., Jean Careme.) Take 3 pounds of the fillet of veal, 4 inches thick, and cut it round or oval, to fit a baking dish or casserole. Lard it closely with strips of bacon; add to this 2 carrots, 2 onions, 2 turnips, and 1 ounce of ham, sliced, parsley, a clove, the trimmings of the veal, salt, pepper, and 1/2 pint of consomme. Lay the fillet on top of this, and, covering it closely, bake until tender. Baste it often. A short time before serving, strain the gravy, thicken it with flour, and serve in the same dish, with spinach, or tomatoes, stuffed or fried potatoes.
Two entrees run together on one page: an épigramme of lamb, which pairs chops with crumbed pieces of braised breast, and a larded, braised fricandeau of veal. Both are straightforward once a few unstated steps are filled in.
- The hinge: press the breast before cuttingLamb breast simmered in broth and boned is soft and gelatinous, and will fall apart under a crumb coating. Cool it flat between two trays with a weight on top for several hours or overnight, then cut the eight pieces. Firm, chilled pieces crumb cleanly and fry without collapsing.
- "Cold Bechamel" is a coating, not a sauceThe béchamel here should be a very thick, well-chilled reduction — closer to a paste than a pouring sauce — used to glue the crumbs on. If chicken stock is used instead, it must be one that sets to a firm jelly when cold, or the crumbs slide off.
- Chops fried then broiledThe instruction to fry, crumb, and then broil the chops is one continuous sequence: the frying cooks them, the crumbs are applied to the warm surface, and the broiler only colours them. A minute or two per side under a hot broiler is enough; longer dries the meat out.
- "Casserole" means the panIn older cookery books a casserole is usually a heavy lidded braising pot rather than a modern open bake-in dish; here the recipe offers "a baking dish or casserole" as alternatives. Any Dutch oven with a close-fitting lid does the job for the fricandeau.
- Oven for the fricandeauNo temperature is given. A 3 lb larded fillet, tightly covered, braises well at around 325F for roughly two hours, until a skewer meets no resistance. The recipe says only to baste often -- the exposed top is meant to glaze.
- LardingLarding a lean veal fillet with strips of bacon requires a larding needle, which few kitchens now keep. Barding — tying sheets of bacon or thin fatback over the top and sides — gives most of the same protection against drying.
- MeasuresHalf a pint of consomme is one cup: this is a braise, not a stew, and the liquid comes only partway up the vegetables beneath the meat. One ounce of ham is roughly a single slice.
- YieldThe épigramme, with four chops and eight pieces of breast, serves four as a main course. The fricandeau serves six. Three cups of cooked vegetables for the centre of the ring is generous for four; two is closer to the mark.
An epigramme d'agneau is a piece of French restaurant wit: two different cuts of the same animal, dressed two different ways, alternated on one dish so the eye reads a pattern. It is generally traced to eighteenth-century French kitchens, where the point was to make something of the cheap breast by braising, pressing, crumbing and frying it, and then to flatter it by setting it beside the expensive chop. The claim attached to the fricandeau here -- that it was invented by "Jean Careme," cook to Leo X -- will not survive scrutiny: Antonin Careme was born in 1784 and worked in Paris and for European courts, some two and a half centuries after that pope's death, and his given name was Marie-Antoine, not Jean. Attributions of this sort are not unusual in nineteenth-century cookbooks, where a French pedigree, however doubtful, helped sell a dish. What is genuine is the technique: larding a lean cut, braising it on a bed of aromatic vegetables in a small amount of consomme, and basting until the top glazes is textbook French method, and the fricandeau was long regarded as a test of a trained cook.