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Lamb Chops, with Herbs
Cut some chops from the loin or neck of lamb. Trim them neatly, and dip them first into clarified butter, and afterwards into a mixture made of equal quantities of chives and parsley. Fry them in hot fat until they are nicely browned, or broil them over a clear fire, and serve them on a hot dish, garnished with crisped parsley. The following sauce may be sent to table with them. Take a sprig of thyme, two sprigs of parsley, and three or four leaves of tarragon. Strip the leaves from the stalks, wash them, and chop them small. Mix them smoothly with a piece of butter the size of an egg, and a dessert-spoonful of flour, and pour over them half a pint of boiling gravy. Simmer four or five minutes over the fire, and rub out any lumps that may form. Season with a little salt and pepper, if required; add a table-spoonful of strained lemon-juice, take the sauce off the fire, and stir it into the well-beaten yolk of an egg-Time, ten or fifteen minutes to cook the chops; a quarter of an hour to prepare the gravy. Probable cost, 1s. per pound. Sufficient, half a dozen chops for three persons.
A straightforward grilled or pan-fried chop with a herb crust and a thickened, egg-enriched herb sauce. The two things that need attention are the cooking time for the chops and the point at which the egg yolk goes in.
- The egg yolk is the hingeThe sauce must come off the heat before the beaten yolk is stirred in, exactly as written, and it must not return to a boil afterwards or it will scramble into threads. If it needs holding, keep it in a bowl over warm — not simmering — water.
- Ten to fifteen minutes is too longModern loin chops an inch thick want about 3-4 minutes a side for pink in the middle, or 55-60C/130-140F internal. Neck chops are tougher and benefit from the full time, or better, from braising.
- Half a pint of gravyAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. "Gravy" here means well-flavoured brown stock, not a finished pan sauce; a good beef or lamb stock is the intent.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 oz / 55 g. With a dessert-spoonful of flour (2 teaspoons) that gives a soft paste rather than a proper roux, so lumps are likely — hence the instruction to rub them out. Whisking the boiling stock in gradually avoids the problem.
- Clarified butterButter with the milk solids and water removed, so it will not burn or spot the herb coating. Ghee works in much the same way. Ordinary melted butter will brown and speckle during frying.
- Dry the herbsThe chives and parsley are chopped and used raw as a coating. Wash and dry them thoroughly before chopping, or the wet herbs slide off the buttered chops and steam rather than crisp.
- A clear fireCoals or embers with no flame and no smoke — the equivalent of a hot grill bar or a very hot ridged pan. Flames scorch the herb crust before the chop is cooked.
- Crisped parsleySprigs briefly deep-fried in hot fat until they stop hissing, seconds only, then drained. They go bitter and black quickly, so this is done at the last moment.
- YieldSix chops for three people, as the original states. Scale the sauce accordingly; it makes enough for six chops with a little over.
Cassell's belongs to the wave of late-Victorian household dictionaries that translated French restaurant technique into English kitchen practice, and this recipe is essentially côtelettes aux fines herbes given an English accent. The chopped-herb coating and the flour-and-butter sauce finished with lemon juice and an egg yolk are both borrowed from French practice, where a yolk liaison was one way to give a sauce body and gloss. The two cuts named tell you something about how a whole animal was sold: the loin chops were the expensive ones, the neck the cheap end, and the book prices meat at a shilling a pound. Tarragon, thyme, chives and parsley in combination is a set loosely related to the classic French fines herbes grouping, though it substitutes thyme for chervil, and its appearance here — in a book aimed at English middle-class households — marks how far that vocabulary had spread.