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Breaded Lamb Chops
Grate some stale bread, season with salt and pepper; prepare some eggs well beaten, have your pan with hot fat ready; dip your chops into the beaten egg and then roll over in the bread crumbs; repeat dipping in egg and rolling in the crumbs, as it is a great improvement; then lay each one into the boiling lard; fry a nice brown. Serve with currant jelly or grape catsup.
A plain shallow-fry with a double coating, written for cooks who kept a crock of lard by the stove. The instructions are complete except for heat, timing and quantities, all of which the original assumes you know.
- Fat temperature"Boiling lard" does not mean boiling — lard smokes and breaks down well below a boil. Aim for 350–360F, deep enough to come halfway up the chops, and adjust so the crumbs sizzle steadily rather than darken in seconds.
- The double coat is the pointThe double coat -- The recipe calls the second pass through egg and crumbs "a great improvement": it builds a thicker crust. Letting the first coat set briefly before repeating helps the second layer adhere.
- Grated stale breadThis means dry, coarse crumbs made by rubbing a day-old loaf on a grater — closer to panko in texture than to the fine dust sold as dried breadcrumbs. Crusts left on give a browner finish.
- Cut and thicknessThe recipe does not say which cut or how thick; rib or loin chops suit the method. If they are about an inch thick, roughly 4 minutes per side brings the interior to about 145F for medium; thin chops will overcook long before the crust colours.
- LardRendered leaf lard fries cleanly at this temperature and was a common frying fat in nineteenth-century kitchens. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point substitutes without harm to the result.
- Grape catsupNot a tomato product. Nineteenth-century grape catsup was spiced grape pulp cooked down with vinegar, sugar, clove and cinnamon — a sweet-sour condiment much like the currant jelly it is offered alongside.
- YieldFigure two chops per person, and drain them on a rack rather than paper so the underside crust stays crisp.
Breading and frying a chop was one common nineteenth-century way of making a modest cut look and eat like a company dish, and the technique has relatives in the German schnitzel and the Italian costoletta alla milanese, though those are traditions of their own. The pairing with currant jelly is the older half of the instruction: tart red jelly with lamb and mutton was well established in British and American service long before mint sauce became the reflexive accompaniment in the United States. Grape catsup belongs to the wider family of fruit "catsups" — walnut, mushroom, cucumber, grape — that filled the condiment shelf before tomato ketchup crowded them out in the early twentieth century, and its appearance here is a reminder that a household still expected to have several such bottles put up from the season's fruit.