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MUTTON CHOPS (a la Bretonne)
Trim six nice mutton chops, season with a tea-spoonful of salt and one of pepper, and pour a few drops of oil over each. Broil for four minutes on each side. Arrange them on a dish, and serve with half a pint of puree of white beans (see BEANS, HARICOT, PUREE OF) mingled with two table-spoonfuls of good hot meat glaze. (See GLAZE.)
A straightforward broiled chop with a bean puree, from the period when "a la Bretonne" on a menu simply meant haricot beans were involved. Two things need translating: the seasoning quantity and the glaze.
- Cut back the seasoningA full teaspoon of pepper for six chops is heavy by modern palates, and a teaspoon of salt distributed over six chops is about right only if they are thick loin chops. Season to taste rather than by the spoonful.
- "Broil" means under or over direct heatIn a British book of this date broiling is a gridiron over coals, or a modern overhead grill or broiler at its highest setting. A ridged cast-iron pan gets you closest on a domestic stove.
- Four minutes a sideThat suits a chop about three-quarters of an inch thick, taken to pink in the middle. Thick French-trimmed chops of an inch and a half will want six or seven minutes a side, or a finish in a 400F oven.
- Half a pint of pureeImperial measure, so 10 fl oz, a scant 1 1/4 US cups. Roughly two-thirds of a cup of dried haricots, soaked and cooked soft, will get you there once pureed with a little of the cooking liquor.
- Meat glazeGlaze is stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold, i.e. demi-glace taken further. A tablespoon or two of reduced brown stock, or good commercial demi-glace, does the same job; a stock cube will not, being mostly salt.
- Mingle off the heatStir the hot glaze into the puree just before serving. Left standing, the bean puree stiffens and dulls, and the glaze skins over.
- YieldSix chops serves three generously or six as part of a larger meal; the recipe gives no indication either way, and in a book of this kind the chops would plausibly be one course among several.
In the French kitchen vocabulary that English cookery books absorbed through the nineteenth century, a la bretonne signalled haricot beans, usually with a brown sauce, the name customarily explained by Brittany's long association with the dried white bean as a field and cottage crop. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was compiled as a household reference rather than a chef's manual, which is why the entry sends you off to two other headings, BEANS, HARICOT, PUREE OF and GLAZE, instead of repeating them: the book expected to be used as a cross-referenced system. The pairing of mutton with white beans is the same logic that produced cassoulet and the older English "haricot of mutton", where haricot is often said to have described the cut-up stew rather than the bean at all, though the derivation is contested.