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Chop, Invalid's
Take a moderately-sized chop, trim away all fat and skin, season it with pepper and salt. Place it between two buttered plates, and bake in a hot oven for a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 7d.
A single-portion dish from the invalid-cookery tradition: one chop, no fat, no sauce, cooked in its own steam. Everything depends on the seal between the plates.
- The hinge: an actual sealThe two plates form a closed chamber so the chop poaches in its own juices rather than roasting dry. If they do not sit flush, the steam escapes and you get a grey, hard chop. Weight the top plate or clamp the pair, and do not open them until serving.
- Do not use your dinner platesModern porcelain and stoneware are not all oven-safe, and glazed earthenware can craze or split at the heat implied here. Use two shallow oven-proof dishes, or a small lidded casserole or ramekin covered with foil, which achieves the same thing.
- "A hot oven"No temperature is given; on the usual modern reading of the phrase this would be somewhere in the region of a hot setting, around 425-450F, though the book itself supplies no figure. At that sort of heat a trimmed chop of ordinary thickness should be cooked through in the quarter-hour given, and the trapped steam keeps it from drying.
- Which chopThe recipe does not say. An unqualified "chop" in a Victorian English kitchen was most often mutton or lamb, a loin or chump chop. A lamb loin chop about an inch thick is the closest thing today; a pork chop works but wants a few minutes more.
- Trimming is not optional hereThe instruction to remove all fat and skin is dietary, not aesthetic: invalid cookery aimed at meat thought easy to digest. Since the fat is gone, the buttered plates are the only thing standing between the meat and the dish.
- The juices are the pointA tablespoon or two of pale gravy collects in the lower plate. Pour it over the chop rather than discarding it; the recipe assumes no other sauce, and there is no seasoning beyond the pepper and salt.
- Yield and servingOne chop, one person. The recipe names no accompaniment; anything plain alongside is a modern choice, not part of the instruction.
- "Probable cost, 7d."Seven pence in pre-decimal currency — the book quotes prices so a housekeeper could cost a menu. It is a period reference point, not a figure that converts usefully.
Cassell's, like other large late-Victorian household books, carried a class of recipes headed "for an invalid": beef tea, arrowroot, gruel, chicken panada, and single chops such as this one. Before hospital care was usual, the sickroom was the household's responsibility, and cookery books were expected to supply food for it -- plain, unspiced, free of fat, and made one portion at a time so that nothing was wasted if the patient would not eat. Cooking between two plates belonged to that repertoire: it needed no special vessel, kept the meat from browning or hardening, and saved the juice, which was thought to be the nourishing part. The wider belief that the strength of meat lay in its juices rather than its fibre was general in nineteenth-century medical and domestic advice rather than traceable to any single source.