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Lamb Chops Breaded
Prepare loin or French chops as for broiling. Dip in crumbs, egg (diluted with cold water, allowing two tablespoons water to each egg), and in crumbs, and fry in deep hot Cottolene six to eight minutes. Drain on brown paper and spread with Maître d'Hôtel Butter.
A short recipe that assumes you know how to trim chops and manage a kettle of deep fat. The details worth translating are the shortening, the crumb order and the frying time.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil-and-beef-suet shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, and the sponsor of this book, which is why it turns up throughout. Any neutral frying fat with a high smoke point substitutes directly.
- Frying temperatureThe book says only "deep hot." Period cookbooks commonly judged deep fat by how quickly a cube of bread browned in it; fat at that stage sits in what a modern cook would read as roughly 365-375F. Cooler than that and the crumb coat absorbs fat and slides; hotter and the crust colors before the meat is done.
- The breading orderCrumbs, then egg, then crumbs. The first dry layer gives the egg something to grip on a wet chop, and it is the reason this coating stays on in deep fat. Do not shorten it to egg-then-crumbs.
- Egg washTwo tablespoons cold water per egg thins the egg enough to drain evenly instead of setting in thick ropes. Beat it just to combine, not to froth.
- "Prepare as for broiling"Means trimming the loin chop's excess fat and, for French chops, scraping the rib bone clean for an inch or so. The six to eight minutes the book allows suits a fairly thin chop; a thick one may still be underdone in the center.
- DrainingBrown paper was ordinary kitchen and shop stock at the time. Modern equivalent is a rack set over a sheet pan -- paper towels trap steam under the crust and soften it.
- Maître d'Hôtel ButterButter creamed with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, chilled and sliced onto the hot chops. The book gives it elsewhere; it is a sauce, not a garnish, and the acid is the point against fried fat.
- YieldFigure two chops per person as a main course, three if they are small French chops.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was published as promotional literature for Cottolene, a mass-marketed shortening made with beef suet rather than an all-vegetable product, and its recipes are organized as complete weekly menus rather than as a reference collection. Breading and deep-frying a chop rather than broiling it was a way of dressing up a familiar cut for a Sunday table, and it also showcased exactly what the sponsor wanted showcased: a fat that could be heated hard without smoking and, the advertising claimed, left food less greasy than lard. Maître d'hôtel butter, the compound parsley-and-lemon butter finishing the dish, comes out of nineteenth-century French professional practice and had become standard shorthand in American cookbooks by this date for making plain broiled or fried meat look like restaurant cooking with almost no work.