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Mutton Chops Dressed with Tomatoes
Place in a pan tomatoes peeled and chopped; season with butter, pepper, sugar, and salt.
Take from your gridiron some nicely broiled mutton chops; put into a pan, cover close, and simmer for fifteen minutes. Lay the chops on a hot dish, put on a little butter, pepper and salt.
With a spoon, cover each chop with tomatoes. Sift over pounded cracker and serve.--Mrs. S. T.
A simple two-stage dish: chops are grilled first, then finished in a tomato stew. The original assumes a coal gridiron and a cook who knows her way around mutton, so a few things need spelling out.
- The hinge: broil first, simmer secondThe chops go onto the gridiron until browned and just short of done, then into the tomatoes for fifteen minutes to finish. Skipping the searing gives you grey boiled meat with no crust to hold the sauce.
- Mutton and its substitutesTrue mutton, from a sheep over a year old, is rare outside halal and specialty butchers. Lamb loin or rib chops work and cook faster; check that a lamb chop is done at 5 to 8 minutes of simmering rather than the full fifteen, which suits tougher mutton.
- TomatoesPeeled and chopped means fresh, in season, scalded and skinned. Out of season, a 28 oz can of whole tomatoes, drained of most juice and broken up, is closer to the intended texture than diced tomatoes, which are treated to stay firm.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For four chops, figure about 1½ lb of tomatoes, 2 tablespoons butter, and a teaspoon of sugar; the sugar is there to correct acidity, not to sweeten, so taste before adding more.
- Covered simmer"Cover close" matters, since the tomatoes give up their liquid and that steam is what keeps the chops from drying. A heavy lid on low heat; the sauce should barely move.
- Pounded crackerPlain soda or water crackers crushed fine, used as a dry topping the way one might use breadcrumbs. Unsalted saltines or matzo crackers crushed in a bag give the same effect. Add it at the table, not in advance, or it goes to paste.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number of chops or servings. Working from the four chops assumed above, that is one chop each for four, or two chops each for two. It wants mashed potato or plain rice to catch the tomato.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and first published in 1878 (copies are also dated 1879), gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries end with initials rather than a full name. Mutton was ordinary meat in nineteenth-century American households in a way it no longer is; sheep were kept as much for wool as for the table, and older animals with strong flavor reached the kitchen regularly. Tomatoes, still regarded with suspicion in parts of the country a generation earlier, had become thoroughly domesticated in Southern cooking by the 1870s, and pairing their acidity with fatty mutton is a sensible piece of kitchen logic. The pounded cracker topping is a recurring habit in American cookbooks of the period, appearing over scalloped oysters, baked tomatoes and macaroni alike, and reflects a pantry in which crackers were a staple keeping good far longer than bread.