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Mutton Chops Broiled
Cut chops from the loin, take all the fat from the under side, place them on a gridiron over a good fire, let the gridiron be placed in a slanting position to prevent the fat from dropping into the fire; when the chops are done put them in a hot dish; season with pepper, salt and butter. Serve with brown mushroom sauce or currant jelly.
A four-line recipe that assumes an open fire and a hinged gridiron. The transferable technique is direct high heat, seasoning after cooking, and keeping rendered fat out of the flame.
- Mutton itselfMutton is sheep over about two years old, stronger and fattier than lamb, and it is rarely stocked in American supermarkets. Loin chops from a lamb are the practical substitute; if you find true mutton at a halal butcher or a farm sale, expect a deeper flavour and slightly longer cooking.
- The gridironA gridiron is a grate of parallel iron bars set over live coals, and the slant instructed here drains fat to one edge instead of into the fire. Over charcoal, bank the coals to one side and tilt nothing; under a broiler, use a slotted broiler pan so the drippings fall clear of the element.
- Why the slant mattersFat hitting coals flares and coats the meat in soot and acrid smoke. This is the one instruction in the recipe worth carrying over intact, by whatever means your equipment allows.
- Heat and timeLoin chops an inch thick want a hot surface and roughly 4 to 5 minutes a side, turning once. Pull them at 130-135F internal for pink at the centre; mutton and lamb both toughen and go livery past 150F.
- TrimmingRemoving the fat from the underside, as directed, helps control flare-ups; it may also reflect a distaste for unrendered mutton fat, though the recipe gives no reason. Leave a thin outer rim of fat for flavour and score it so the chop does not curl.
- Season at the endPepper, salt and butter go on in the hot dish, not on the raw meat. Salting on the plate keeps the surface dry enough to brown; the butter melting into the meat juices is the sauce, before any other sauce arrives.
- Rest themThe original says only "put them in a hot dish," which conveniently doubles as a rest. Five minutes covered loosely lets the juices settle.
- YieldTwo loin chops per person is a normal serving; three if they are small. Brown mushroom sauce suits a plain dinner, currant jelly the older English pairing with sheep meat.
Broiling over a gridiron was a common treatment for a chop in nineteenth-century English and American cooking, and the loin chop — a small T-bone cut across the saddle — was often associated with quick, respectable, single-serving cookery. Mutton was still ordinary meat in this period: sheep were kept for wool as much as for meat, and older animals came to table in numbers that make the strong flavour and the careful fat-trimming here entirely sensible. The currant jelly alternative is the older habit, inherited from British practice, where a sharp fruit preserve was set against fatty sheep meat much as mint sauce was; brown mushroom sauce belongs to the more elaborate hotel-and-restaurant cooking that American household books of the period were increasingly borrowing from. American appetite for mutton fell away through the twentieth century for a number of reasons, among them the marketing of lamb as milder, which is why the cut named here now reaches most kitchens as a lamb chop.