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Lamb and Mutton: Chops
Breaded Chops. 4 loin chops, 1 egg, 1 cupful bread crumbs, 1 teaspoonful salt, Dash pepper, 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley.
Cut chops three quarters of an inch thick. Dip each in beaten egg and lay on a meat board. Mix bread crumbs with salt and pepper, minced parsley, and a little grated nutmeg.
Roll the chops in the bread crumbs and fry in boiling fat until light brown. Garnish with slices of lemon and sprigs of parsley.
Curry of Lamb (Southern recipe).
Breast lamb, 2 onions, 1 carrot, Bunch parsley, 1 bay leaf, 4 tablespoonfuls butter, 3 tablespoonfuls curry powder, 2 dozen sweet potatoes, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, 3 tablespoonfuls grated cocoanut, 3 dashes McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce.
Cut lamb in inch squares, trim, and put on fire with enough water to cover; add onion, carrot, parsley, and bay leaf; cook half an hour. Prepare LAMB AND MUTTON butter in saucepan with curry powder, simmer five minutes, add flour, moisten with stock of lamb strained; add pieces of lamb, also sweet potatoes, cocoanut, salt, and tabasco. Cook fifteen minutes, and serve with garnishing of boiled rice. Chicken, veal, or mutton may be prepared in the same way.
Lamb Chops à la Boulangère (French recipe). 10 or 12 cutlets, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, cupful cream, Salt, pepper, and cayenne, 1 tablespoonful chopped chervil, 1 lemon.
Trim the cutlets, season with salt, pepper, and a little cayenne, dip in olive oil, then in flour. Broil over a slow fire. While they are cooking, put cream in a stewpan, and when boiling add butter, chervil, the juice of lemon, and a little pepper and salt; stir quickly till it forms a smooth sauce; pour it over the cutlets when done, and serve quickly. Fillets of veal or rabbit are good cooked in this way.
Mutton Chops à la Cleveland. 8 mutton chops, 3 tablespoonfuls sweet oil, 3 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 onion, 1 pint mushrooms, pint strained tomatoes, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce, Salt, Chopped parsley.
Fry the chops in the oil and butter.
Put them on a hot platter while you make the sauce. Chop the onion and mushrooms fine; put them in a saucepan with a little butter and fry until brown. Add the tomatoes, and boil five minutes; add the tabasco, salt, pepper, and parsley. Lay the chops in a circle; pour the sauce in the center, and garnish with points of toast. Broiled Lamb Chops.
Have the chops cut thick, dust with salt and pepper; broil over a quick fire; pile neatly on a hot platter, and put a small bit of butter on each one.
Stuffed Mutton Chops. 10 mutton chops, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 tablespoonful chopped onion, cupful chopped mushrooms, 1 teaspoonful salt, Pinch pepper, 1 tablespoonful flour, 2 tablespoonfuls stock.
Trim the chops, which have been cut very thick. With a sharp knife split each chop in two, without sepa- C Brown-Bread or Pudding Mold; b, Waffle Iron; c, Patty Pans. rating the meat from the bone. Put the butter in a pan, add the onion, and cook five minutes; add to this the chopped mushrooms, salt, and pepper, and cook five minutes longer.
Add the flour and stock. Cook for a few minutes; stuff each chop with this mixture after it has cooled; press them tightly together, and broil.
Mutton Cutlets with Mushrooms.
Take the bones from mutton chops, and use the round, lean portions.
Brush with melted butter and broil.
Serve them on rounds of toasted bread, with mushroom sauce poured over. Sauce.-Peel 1 pint mushrooms, cut in pieces, season, and cook in cream sauce for ten minutes.
MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK Lamb Fricassee (German recipe). 2 breasts lamb, pan, set it in a hot oven, and bake brown.-GESINE LEMCKE. 2 ounces butter, 2 tablespoonfuls chopped onion, Kidneys à la Maître d'hôtel (French 2 teaspoonfuls salt, tablespoonful butter, 2 tablespoonfuls flour.
Dip the lamb breasts into boiling water, then instantly into cold water; cut the meat into two-inch pieces.
Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the onions, and cook five minutes without browning; season the meat with the salt; add it to the saucepan; cook ten minutes, cover with boiling water, put on the lid, and cook until done. Shortly before serving, melt tablespoonful butter, add the flour, stir, and cook a few minutes; add it to the fricassee, and boil a few minutes longer.-GESINE LEMCKE. recipe). a Split and cut in two, lengthwise, lamb's kidneys. Run a skewer through to keep them flat. Dip in melted butter and fine bread crumbs; season with salt and pepper. Broil five minutes. five minutes. Serve with maître d'hôtel butter.
Lamb-Heart Stew (French recipe). 3 lambs' hearts, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 peeled lemon, bay leaf, Salt, Pepper. 6 lamb kidneys, 1 ounce butter, Deviled Kidneys (German recipe).
Wash the hearts and slice, cutting across the grain of the meat. Dry slightly and dust with flour. Put the butter in a stewpan and when hot ada the meat; stir and cook about ten minutes. Add enough water to near- 2 tablespoonfuls chopped onions, ly cover the meat, the lemon cut in 1 teaspoonful chopped parsley, slices, and bay leaf. Cover the kettle, and cook gently half an hour, stirring often and adding more water, if needed; add salt and pepper; remove the bay leaf and lemon, thicken, and serve.
Lamb's Liver Curried. bruised clove garlic 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 cupful stock, Yolks 3 eggs, Cayenne pepper.
Split the kidneys, remove the white part in center and chop fine. Place the butter in a saucepan, add the onions, and cook three minutes; add the kidneys and salt; stir, and cook three minutes; then add the stock, and cook three minutes longer. Remove from the fire, add the eggs, parsley, and a little pepper. Fill this mixture into 6 ramequins, sprinkle over each tablespoonful fresh grated bread crumbs and a little melted butter. Place the ramequins in a tin 1 lamb's liver, 1 onion, Few slices pork, teaspoonful curry powder.
Cut the lamb's liver in slices, soak in salted water for five minutes, take from the water, and dry in a cloth.
Slice the onion and fry with pork.
Take out the pork and fry the liver.
Brown well, add the curry powder to the sauce, stir smooth, and serve.
A run of chop, cutlet and variety-meat recipes from a period when mutton was as common as lamb and a chop was expected to be an inch thick. Several quantities in this group have lost their fractions, so read the amounts with judgment rather than literally.
- Missing fractionsA number of measures here read as bare units where the original almost certainly specified a half: "cupful cream" in the Boulangere sauce, "pint strained tomatoes" for eight chops, "teaspoonful curry powder" for one liver, "cupful chopped mushrooms" in the stuffing. Treat these as approximate and season to taste as you go.
- The sweet potatoes in the curry"2 dozen sweet potatoes" for one breast of lamb is out of proportion to everything else in the list. It most likely meant two dozen small new potatoes or two sweet potatoes cut up; use about 1 lb of diced sweet potato and taste for balance.
- Fire temperatures"Boiling fat" for breaded chops is usually read as somewhere around 350-375F, hot enough that crumbs sizzle at once without darkening in seconds. "A quick fire" for broiling is full heat with the meat close to the element; "a slow fire" for the Boulangere cutlets is moderate heat further back, so the floured surface colours without scorching.
- MuttonMutton is sheep over a year old, deeper in flavour and firmer than lamb. It is sold now mainly by halal butchers and specialist farms. Lamb shoulder chops stand in reasonably for the Cleveland and stuffed-chop recipes, though they cook faster and want less browning.
- Breast of lambThe cut called for in the curry and the fricassee is fatty and full of cartilage. Skim the cooking liquid well before it becomes the sauce base, or chill the strained stock and lift the fat off, which is the cleaner method.
- Chops cut thickThe breaded chops are specified at three-quarters of an inch; the stuffed chops are only told to be "cut very thick", and need enough depth to be split in two off the bone without tearing. Ask the butcher rather than buying pre-cut supermarket chops, which are usually thinner.
- Chervil and cayenneChervil goes limp and loses its anise note within a day or two of picking, which is why it rarely appears in shops. Fresh tarragon used at half the quantity, plus parsley, gives a comparable result. The "little cayenne" in that recipe is a pinch, not a teaspoon.
- Tabasco by nameThe brand is named outright in two of these ingredient lists, as period American cookbooks often named proprietary sauces. Three dashes in a curry serving four is mild by current expectations; adjust upward if you want heat.
- Kidneys and heartsLamb kidneys need the white core cut out, as the text says, and five minutes under a broiler is right for split kidneys. Sliced lamb hearts are lean and tighten if rushed, so keep the half-hour simmer gentle.
- YieldChop counts vary: four breaded chops serve two, eight mutton chops four, and ten stuffed chops or ten to twelve cutlets five to six, at two a person. The curry and the fricassee, made with a breast of lamb, feed about four; the ramekin dish is explicitly six.
These pages come from the chop-and-cutlet section of Mrs. Curtis's cookbook, and they show how an American kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century assembled its repertoire: a French cutlet with a cream and chervil sauce, a German fricassee signed by Gesine Lemcke, who taught at a well-known Brooklyn cooking school and published in both English and German, a "Southern" curry sweetened with coconut and sweet potato, and a mutton chop named for Cleveland. Curry powder had been a fixture in English-language cookbooks for a century by then, and here it appears alongside coconut and a Louisiana bottled pepper sauce. Mutton runs through the section alongside lamb; the taste for young lamb, and the near-disappearance of mutton from American butchers' counters, belongs largely to the decades after the Second World War.