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Chops, Stewed with Onion
Take half a dozen nice loin chops, trim them neatly, remove nearly all the fat, and broil them for two minutes on each side, then place them in clean blotting paper. Cut two large Spanish onions into slices, and put them into a stewpan with half a tea-spoonful of salt, and four ounces of fresh butter. Place the chops upon them, and cover the saucepan closely, and stew all gently till the onions are reduced to pulp. Before dishing, pour a tea-spoonful of chilli vinegar upon the dish. Steak may be cooked in this way as well as chops. Time to broil the chops, four minutes; to stew them with the onions, until the latter are reduced to pulp, about half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 1d. per pound. Allow one chop for each person.
A one-pan braise that depends entirely on the onions giving up their own liquid: nothing else is added, so the pan must be tightly covered and the heat very low.
- The hinge: no added liquidThe onions supply all the moisture, so a heavy pan with a well-fitting lid and the lowest possible burner setting are essential. Lift the lid as little as you can, and if the butter starts to fry rather than sweat, drop the heat further or slide the pan onto a diffuser.
- Which chopsThe recipe says only 'loin chops' and gives no meat or thickness; in Victorian usage an unqualified chop was most often mutton, for which lamb loin chops are the modern stand-in. Pork or veal loin chops work in the same method, though pork is better cooked through before it goes on the onions.
- "Broil" means grill or searTwo minutes a side over direct heat, or in a smoking-hot heavy pan, is a browning step rather than cooking. The chops finish in the covered pan.
- Blotting paperVictorian kitchens kept sheets of unsized blotting paper for draining fat. Kitchen paper does the same job; the point is to get the rendered fat off the chops so it does not thin the onion pulp.
- Spanish onions and the butterTwo large Spanish onions is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb, sliced. Four ounces of butter is a full stick and is not a misprint, but 2 oz gives a less greasy result if the onions are juicy.
- Chilli vinegarA standard Victorian condiment: wine or cider vinegar steeped with dried red chillies. Bottled versions still exist; otherwise steep two or three dried chillies in a few tablespoons of vinegar for a week, or use cider vinegar with a few drops of hot sauce. A teaspoon over the dish is a seasoning, not a sauce.
- TimingHalf an hour is optimistic for onions to collapse to a true pulp. Expect 45 minutes to an hour at a bare simmer; test by pressing a slice against the side of the pan.
- YieldSix chops, one per person, as the original states. The onion pulp is the sauce, so serve it spooned around rather than under, with mashed or boiled potatoes.
Cassell's belongs to the great late-Victorian run of household encyclopaedias, and the costings quoted per pound were meant to let a cook price a dinner before she shopped. The technique here, meat set on a bed of sliced onions and stewed under a lid until they melt, is the domestic English cousin of the French soubise, in which onions are stewed in butter and sieved into a purée to serve with lamb or veal. Chilli vinegar is the period detail that dates the recipe most clearly: bottled pepper and chilli vinegars are often said to have been a fixture of the nineteenth-century cruet stand, used the way a modern cook reaches for hot sauce or a squeeze of lemon. Spanish onions, large, mild and sweet, were imported in quantity by then and were valued for exactly this kind of long, sugary reduction.