1879: Epigram of Lamb By AMANDA HESSER Except in the rarest cases — say, Thomas Keller’s oysters and pearls, made with oysters, tapioca and caviar — diners don’t have much patience for wit. They want to be awed with flavor and originality. But even in centuries past, the occasional concept dish captured the imagination. One such dish was “veal hocks à l’epigramme,” or braised veal, which appeared in La Varenne’s 17th-century cookbook, “Le Cuisinier François.” Braised Crisp Pigs’ Feet With Radish and Shaved-Vegetable Salad Over the years, cooks swapped lamb for the veal and changed the way it was prepared. Epigram of lamb came to mean a dish that altered your perception of a dense, fatty cut of lamb by transforming it into thin, breaded cutlets. “Epigram” may refer to the preparation or to the small cuts of meat, but the playful word has inevitably managed to irk some chefs. One of La Varenne’s contemporaries claimed the dish was emblematic of all that was wrong in cooking. And Ken Albala, a food historian at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., pointed me to “Apicius Redivivus or the Cook’s Oracle,” a 19th-century cookbook in which one critic is quoted as saying, “What can any person suppose to be the meaning of a shoulder of lamb in epigram, unless it were a poor dish, for a Penniless Poet?” Meow! After making epigram of lamb, Eric Korsh, the chef at Restaurant Eloise in Sebastopol, Calif., called it a “perfect simple recipe.” The braising makes for tender, fragrant cutlets, and there’s something in the sautéing that makes the fat in the lamb seem extra succulent. “It’s like lamb Wiener schnitzel, but beautiful,” Korsh said. The epigram of lamb that ran in The Times in 1879 came from a publication called Young Ladies’ Magazine. And although it takes two days to make, the actual work involved is brief. The recipe instructs you to serve it with peas, although I’ve seen other versions insisting on asparagus; both are great choices. I made two small changes to the Times recipe. Rather than frying the cutlets in lard (feel free to do so if you like), I used a combination of butter and olive oil. And I included lemon wedges for squeezing over the cutlets at the table, an Italian touch. Korsh, whom I’d asked to update the 19th-century epigram, was taken by the way the fat in the lamb cutlets crisped. Seeking to replicate that effect with pork, he found his inspiration in Spain, where he’d seen cooks brown a braised pork snout under a bacon press and eat it for breakfast. To achieve the proper crispness, he used pigs’ feet. The feet, which contain sweet dabs of meat nestled in gelatin, braise well, and once their bones are removed, they can be pressed under a weight — Korsh uses a brick wrapped in foil — as they slowly sauté. His recipe is fun to make because the trotters morph significantly. They soften and shrink and crisp and brown, and you can end up with a flat crackling the size of a playing card. Rather than peas for accompaniment, Korsh went for a shaved-vegetable salad, bright with acidity: fennel, celery and radish wrapped in vinegar and two kinds of mustard. Brisk lashings of purity between sweet bits of sin.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 14:25:03 +0000
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