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MUTTON CHOPS (en Casserole)
Melt two table-spoonfuls of butter, add three slices of onion, and saute in it the chops cut from a shoulder of mutton. Place in a casserole a quarter of a cupful each of carrots, turnips, celery, and onion, lay the chops on top of the vegetables and add one cupful of stock or hot water. Cover and cook about one and a half hours, season with salt and pepper, add three potatoes cut in slices and parboiled, and more stock if necessary. Cover and cook until tender. Remove cover to brown the chops and potatoes. Serve from the casserole.
A plain braise of shoulder chops in a lidded pot, written when "en casserole" still meant the vessel rather than the dish. The instructions assume you know how much liquid a braise wants, so a few numbers help.
- What the casserole isHere the casserole is the pot itself — a lidded earthenware or enamelled vessel that goes to the table. A Dutch oven or any heavy covered pot with an ovenproof handle does the same job.
- No temperature is givenThe recipe gives no temperature and does not say whether the pot goes in the oven or on the stove; a slow oven (roughly 300–325F) or a very low burner will do. The liquid should barely tremble; a rolling simmer will squeeze the chops tight before the connective tissue softens.
- Shoulder chops, specificallyShoulder is the cut that rewards ninety minutes. Loin or rib chops will be dry and stringy long before that, so if the butcher offers those, cook them fast instead of following this method.
- A quarter of a cupful eachAbout 1 to 1½ oz per vegetable, diced small — roughly half a medium carrot, a small chunk of turnip, a stalk of celery and half a small onion. Cut them to a similar size so they finish together.
- One cupful of stock is not a lotThat is deliberate: this is a braise, not a stew. The liquid should come no more than a third of the way up the chops so the exposed tops can brown at the end.
- Season earlier than toldThe recipe salts at the ninety-minute mark. Salting the chops before they go into the butter gives better seasoning through the meat and a better crust in the pan.
- The uncovered finishRemoving the lid to brown is the step that makes the dish. Raise the heat to 425F or slide the pot under the grill for a few minutes, and spoon a little of the pan liquid over the potatoes first so they glaze rather than dry.
- YieldThe recipe gives no count of chops, only the chops from one shoulder; the three potatoes and single cupful of stock suit about three or four servings, with the potatoes standing in for any other starch.
"En casserole" appears in English-language cookbooks from the later nineteenth century as a French borrowing, and at that point it generally described the earthenware pot in which food was both cooked and brought to the table; the modern sense of a casserole as a kind of baked dish came later, once the vessel had become commonplace enough to lend its name to the contents. Mutton — sheep older than a year, with a stronger flavour and tougher shoulder than modern lamb — was an everyday British roasting and braising meat of the period, and its near-disappearance from British and American butchers over the twentieth century is why so many Victorian recipes now read as instructions for a meat nobody sells. Serving straight from the pot saved both a serving dish and the heat lost in transferring.