Home › Meats and Poultry › Breaded Chops
Breaded Chops
Cut a loin of lamb into chops three-quarters of an inch thick. Dip each one in beaten egg and lay on a meat board.
Mix a teacup of grated bread crumbs with a saltspoon of salt, a pinch of black pepper, a tablespoon of minced parsley and a little grated nutmeg. Roll the chops in the bread crumbs and fry in boiling fat until a light brown. Take up on a heated dish and garnish with slices of lemon and sprigs of parsley.
A plain pan-fried breaded lamb chop, and the whole thing turns on getting the crumbs to stay put and the meat off the heat before it dries out.
- Make the coating stickPat the chops thoroughly dry and dust them lightly with flour before the egg, which the original skips. Crumbs laid on damp meat with no flour anchor slide off in the fat; resting the breaded chops on the board for ten minutes also firms the coating.
- Teacup and saltspoonA teacup of crumbs is roughly half to three-quarters of a cup, though period usage varies. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon; if that tastes thin to you, more salt for a cup of crumbs plus the meat will not hurt, but it is a departure from the recipe.
- Grated bread crumbsThese are dry, stale bread rubbed on a box grater — coarser and drier than commercial fine crumbs. Do not use seasoned crumbs from a can; the parsley, pepper and nutmeg are the seasoning here.
- "Boiling fat"Fat is not literally boiling; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble and hiss when the food goes in, in modern terms somewhere around 350-375F. The recipe does not say how deep the fat should be — period usage covers both a shallow skillet and a deep kettle — and a heavy skillet with enough lard, clarified butter or neutral oil to come partway up the chops will do.
- Cooking timeThree-quarter-inch loin chops need about 3 to 4 minutes a side. They will be light brown by then and 130–135F at the centre for pink; the USDA figure for whole cuts of lamb is 145F with a three-minute rest. Cook until the crumbs are dark and the chop is grey throughout and you have wasted good lamb.
- Nutmeg"A little grated nutmeg" in a period meat coating means a whisper — an eighth of a teaspoon at most for a cup of crumbs. Grate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg is flat and reads as dusty.
- YieldA trimmed lamb loin gives roughly eight chops of this thickness, enough for four. Fry in two batches rather than crowding the pan, and hold the first batch on a rack in a 200F oven so the crust does not steam.
Breaded chops belong to the French côtelette panée tradition that ran through American cookery writing all through the nineteenth century, and the sequence — egg, seasoned crumb, shallow fat, lemon and parsley on the platter — is essentially the one Anglo-American cookbooks had long been printing. The lemon is often said not to be decoration in origin: acid against fried fat was a conventional corrective, and diners were presumably expected to squeeze it. That the recipe specifies a loin of lamb cut at home says something about the period kitchen, where a cook might buy a primal cut and portion it herself rather than picking up chops ready sawn, though butchers also sold chops already cut. Good Housekeeping began as a magazine in 1885, and its cookery collections drew on the same body of household-column recipes, which is why entries like this one are brisk, assume a competent hand at the stove, and offer no temperature and no timing at all.