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Lamb Chops, with Cucumber Sauce
Dip the chops in beaten egg and bread-crumbs, and fry them (see LAMB CHOPS, FRIED). When nicely browned, arrange them in a circle on a hot dish, and put in the centre a sauce prepared as follows. Peel a young fresh cucumber, and cut it into dice; strew a little pepper and salt over these. Melt three or four ounces of butter in a saucepan, put in the cucumber, cover it closely, and place it on a moderate fire, shaking the pan frequently, to prevent sticking. When it is steamed until the pieces of cucumber are quite tender, but unbroken, serve them in the centre of the dish. Time, eight or nine minutes to boil the chops; about twenty minutes to stew the cucumber.
Two simple operations that need only accuracy: crumbed chops fried hard enough to brown, and a cucumber stewed in butter until tender but still holding its shape.
- The hinge: the cucumber must not break downKeep the heat low, the lid on, and the pan moving. The cucumber should end up translucent and yielding but still in recognisable dice; once the cubes collapse the sauce becomes watery pulp rather than the buttery ragout intended.
- "A moderate fire"On a modern hob this is low to medium-low, no more. Butter at this quantity will brown and then burn if the pan is left over a lively flame while it sits covered for twenty minutes.
- Three or four ounces of butterThat is 85-115 g, for one cucumber. It is deliberate: the butter is the sauce, since nothing else is added. Halving it gives you steamed cucumber instead.
- Contradictory timingThe instructions say to fry the chops, but the time line says "eight or nine minutes to boil" them, an inconsistency in the original. Take eight or nine minutes as the total pan time for crumbed chops about 2 cm thick, turned once.
- Salting the cucumberThe pepper and salt are strewn on before cooking, which draws out liquid. If you want a tighter, more buttery result, salt the dice, leave them 15 minutes, blot them dry, then start the stewing.
- Choosing the cucumber"Young fresh" mattered because older cucumbers of the period ran to tough skin and well-developed seeds. A small firm cucumber, peeled (and seeded if the seeds are large, though the recipe asks only for peeling), or a couple of Lebanese cucumbers, gives roughly what the recipe assumes.
- CrumbingThe recipe says only "bread-crumbs"; dry crumbs give the firmer crust this treatment suits. Press them on and rest the chops ten minutes before frying so the coating sets and does not slide off in the fat.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe names no number of chops; reckoning two a head, eight chops and one cucumber will do for four. Arrange the chops overlapping in a ring on a hot dish and spoon the cucumber and its butter into the middle, as directed; the dish depends on both components being genuinely hot.
Cucumber cooked in butter, rather than served raw, was common in nineteenth-century English kitchens, where the vegetable was often thought hard to digest uncooked, though raw cucumber dressed with vinegar was equally common in the period; stewing, frying and glazing it appear across the period's cookery books. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery was compiled as a household reference in dictionary form, which is why this entry reads as a cross-reference to another one: the frying method is filed under Lamb Chops, Fried, and the cook is expected to look it up. The instruction to arrange the chops in a circle with the garnish heaped in the centre follows a durable formula of presentation, a ring of neatly browned cutlets around a bright centre, which persisted regardless of service style.