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Mutton Chops
Take chops from the best end of the neck, saw off about four inches from the top and the chine-bones. Cut away the skin and gristle from the upper end of the bone, which will give the cutlet a round, plump appearance. Sprinkle each chop with salt and pepper, and dip them separately into dissolved butter. Strew with bread-crumbs, and broil over a clear slow fire, that the crumbs may not acquire too much colour; or, oil each chop slightly, and broil over a brisk fire. A trimmed mutton cutlet of five ounces in weight will require about six minutes to cook. Time, with bread-crumbs, seven or eight minutes.
A straightforward grilled cutlet, but the butchery instructions assume a whole best end of neck on the block in front of you and a coal grill that no longer exists in most kitchens.
- What to buy"Best end of neck" is the rack — the same cut sold today as lamb or mutton rack, French-trimmed cutlets, or rib chops. Ask the butcher to chine it (remove the backbone) and shorten the rib bones; the recipe's instruction to saw about four inches from the top of the bones is describing the same trimming, though whether four inches is what is removed or what remains is not clear from the text.
- Mutton versus lambMutton means sheep over two years old, and it is stronger-flavoured and firmer than lamb. Most butchers sell lamb by default; mutton is a special order and benefits from slightly gentler cooking than the timings here suggest.
- The hinge: two fires, two methodsThe recipe gives a genuine either/or. Crumbed chops go over a slow clear fire so the crumbs colour gradually; plain oiled chops go over a brisk fire for a hard sear. Mixing the two — crumbs over high heat — gives burnt coating and raw centre.
- "Broil" here means grillIn British usage of this period broiling is cooking on a gridiron over the coals, not under an overhead element. A charcoal grill or a ridged cast-iron pan reproduces it; an overhead broiler works for the crumbed version, where radiant heat from above suits the coating.
- TimingsSix minutes for a five-ounce trimmed cutlet, as the recipe specifies, will give a pink centre and is still the right ballpark. Thicker supermarket cutlets need proportionally longer; 130–135F at the centre is medium-rare.
- Dissolved butterThis means melted and, ideally, clarified. Whole melted butter contains milk solids that will scorch and blacken over the coals; clarified butter carries the crumbs without burning.
- YieldA rack yields seven or eight cutlets. Allow two or three per person as a main course, one as part of a larger Victorian service.
The mutton chop was less a dish than a fixed point of nineteenth-century English eating, the standard order at chop-houses, clubs and railway hotels, and the thing invalids and convalescents were fed when everything else was thought too rich. The elaborate trimming — sawing the bones short, scraping the upper inch clean so the cutlet sits round and plump — is presentation work of the kind associated with French kitchen practice, where the bared bone becomes a handle and the eye of meat a neat medallion. Mutton was then the ordinary meat and lamb the dearer, a ratio that reversed over the twentieth century as sheep were slaughtered younger; the flavour Victorian cooks took for granted is now the harder one to find.