Season lamb chops; dredge with flour and fry until brown; keep hot. Fry 1 chopped onion and 1 small carrot in two tablespoonfuls of butter. Add 1 tablespoonful of flour; stir until light brown. Add ½ cup of water; let boil well; add parsley, a few cloves and peppercorns, salt and pepper and 1 bay-leaf minced fine. Boil well. Add 1 glass of claret; then pour the sauce hot over the chops, and garnish with French peas.
A quick pan sauce built in the chop pan's tradition: brown the meat, build a small brown roux with aromatics, loosen with water and finish with red wine. The whole thing takes about half an hour, and the only real decision is how far to cook the chops.
- The hinge: don't cook the chops in the sauceThey are fried, set aside hot, and the finished sauce is poured over at the last moment. Loin or rib chops about an inch thick need roughly 3 minutes a side in a hot pan for medium-rare (130-135F at the centre); hold them on a plate in a 200F oven while the sauce comes together.
- "1 glass of claret"Claret is the English term for red Bordeaux. A wineglassful in period cookbooks is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, though "a glass" may well have meant more; anywhere from 1/4 to 2/3 cup of a dry, medium-bodied red works. Let it boil a minute or two after adding.
- Whole spicesA few cloves and peppercorns dropped into half a cup of liquid will not dissolve. Tie them in cheesecloth or strain the sauce before serving; biting a clove ruins the plate.
- The minced bay leafThe instruction to mince the bay leaf fine is best ignored. Dried bay stays sharp and papery no matter how small the pieces; add it whole and lift it out, or the sauce will be full of splinters.
- Quantity of liquidHalf a cup of water plus a glass of wine, thickened with a tablespoon of flour, gives a thin gravy for two to four chops. Beef or chicken stock in place of the water gives the depth this sauce is clearly reaching for.
- Roux colour"Stir until light brown" means cooking the flour into the butter and vegetables until it smells nutty and turns the shade of pale toast, a couple of minutes over medium heat. Stop before it darkens or the sauce will taste bitter and thicken poorly.
- French peasPetits pois, the small sweet variety, sold canned in the period. Frozen baby peas warmed in butter are the direct modern substitute.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many chops; the sauce as written suits roughly two to four, which serves two generously or four as part of a larger meal. Double the aromatics and wine for a larger platter.
This comes from a calendar cookbook that assigns a nationality to each day of the year, and "Belgian" here appears to signal a style rather than a documented regional dish: chops finished with a red-wine brown sauce and a garnish of tiny peas read as French-adjacent cooking. The sauce itself is a domestic shortcut to the classic brown sauce of professional kitchens, where a proper espagnole would have simmered for hours with veal bones; here the same flavour outline of browned mirepoix, browned flour, wine and a bouquet of clove, peppercorn and bay is compressed into a few minutes on the stove. Claret was the usual English name for red Bordeaux, a usage reaching back to the medieval wine trade.