France and the Alps · Volume 13, Wine, Mustard and the Fifth Quarter
Tablier de sapeur
Lyon
Illustration
Originally called "tablier de Gnafron", after the leather-aproned cobbler puppet of Lyon's Guignol theatre. The change to "tablier de sapeur", the story usually told rather than settled history, since it rests on no documented period source, is attributed to Maréchal de Castellane, military governor of Lyon from 1850, a noted gourmet and tripe enthusiast who had himself served as a sapeur, a military engineer, wearing a leather apron for protection during heavy labour.
As tradition built it
No source gives an exact marinating or frying time; judge readiness by colour and crispness rather than a fixed clock.
Ingredients
- 1kg gras-double, the smooth membrane of the beef rumen
- to cover a well-seasoned bouillon
- 200ml white wine, for marinating
- flour for dusting flour
- 2 eggs
- 200g breadcrumb
- to serve sauce gribiche, traditionally flavoured with chives, or plain steamed potatoes
Method
- Cook the gras-double in a well-seasoned bouillon until tender.
- Marinate it briefly in white wine.
- Cut into rectangles or triangles, bread in the classic flour, egg and breadcrumb sequence, and fry until golden and crisp.
- Serve with sauce gribiche, traditionally flavoured with chives, or plain steamed potatoes. No source found in the research behind this chapter gives exact marinating or frying times for this dish, an honest gap rather than an invented precision; judge by colour and crispness rather than a fixed clock.
What a modern chef changes
A sous vide poach, a dehydrated breadcrumb, Big Green Egg frying and a proper cold-emulsion gribiche
Method
- Poach the gras-double sous vide at a gentle 85°C for several hours before marinating, for consistent, even tenderness through the whole piece rather than the variable result a pot simmer can give a cut this size.
- Pane it with a finer, drier breadcrumb, made by dehydrating stale bread and blitzing it fine in the high-power blender, for a lighter, crisper crust than a standard fresh breadcrumb coating gives.
- Fry over the Big Green Egg with a cast-iron skillet set directly on the grate, for genuinely high, dry, even heat and a properly crisp crust rather than a soft one from an underpowered domestic hob.
- Build the gribiche with a proper cold emulsion technique, egg yolk worked in gradually with oil exactly as for a mayonnaise, rather than simply stirring chopped hard-boiled egg through a vinaigrette, for a genuinely creamy, stable sauce rather than a broken, oily one.