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Ragout of Lamb
(Germany.) Cover 2 pounds of the breast of lamb with cold water, and simmer for ten minutes. Throw away this water, and cut up the meat into pieces. Add 1 sliced onion, a carrot, a piece of celery, parsley, sweet marjoram, pepper, and salt. Cook these with a little butter, and the meat, 10 minutes; dredge with flour, add 1/2 pint mutton broth--or hot water--and stew until tender. Take out the meat, add yolks of 2 eggs and a tablespoonful of vinegar to the sauce, strain it, and pour over. Serve with sorrel.
A plain German-style lamb stew finished with an egg-and-vinegar liaison. The finish is where it succeeds or curdles.
- The hinge: the egg yolksPull the pan off the heat before the yolks go in, and temper them first by whisking a ladle of hot broth into the beaten yolks and vinegar. Returned to the pan, the sauce should be warmed only until it thickens slightly; anything approaching a simmer will scramble it into grains.
- Breast of lambA fatty, bony cut sold today as lamb breast or riblets, often needing a butcher's order. Two pounds bone-in feeds two or three. The initial ten-minute blanch is there to firm the meat and throw off scum and surplus fat, and it is worth keeping.
- Half a pintOne cup in American measure. It is a small amount of liquid for two pounds of bony meat, so keep the lid on and add hot water as it reduces; the meat should stay half-submerged.
- "Stew until tender"Expect an hour to an hour and a half at a bare simmer for breast, not the ten-minute intervals given earlier in the recipe. The meat is done when it slips from the bone.
- Dredge with flourMeaning sprinkle flour over the meat and vegetables in the buttered pan and stir it in to cook briefly before the liquid goes in, the same principle as a roux. About two tablespoons suits this quantity.
- Sweet marjoram and mutton brothSweet marjoram is ordinary marjoram, milder than oregano; a teaspoon dried or a small sprig fresh. Mutton broth is essentially unobtainable now, and lamb or a light beef stock does the job.
- Skim the fatBreast of lamb renders a great deal. Lift the meat out, let the sauce settle a minute and spoon off the fat before the yolks go in, or the liaison will not bind.
- SorrelMost likely served as a cooked green, wilted in butter, its sharpness answering the vinegar in the sauce; the recipe says only 'serve with sorrel' and gives no treatment. It appears at farmers' markets in spring; young spinach with a squeeze of lemon is a common substitute.
Breast of lamb stewed down and finished with egg yolks and vinegar belongs to a broad family of central European sour ragouts, kin to the saure preparations of German and Austrian home cooking, where acid and a yolk binding stand in for cream. The technique is older than either nation's cookbooks: thickening a sauce with egg and sharpening it with vinegar or verjuice was standard medieval European practice, and it survived longest in the thrifty end of the butcher's counter, where cuts like breast and neck needed both long cooking and a strong sauce. The book labels the dish simply '(Germany.)', so the reader gets the recipe as a souvenir of Germany rather than as regional cookery proper. The sorrel on the side is the period's tell: before the leaf fell out of Anglo-American gardens it was commonly served as a sour green with fatty mutton and lamb.