Crown Roast
Or Rack of Mutton. Prepare the loin as for French chops and arrange like a crown, rolling the loin backward. Tie securely. Cover each chop bone with thin strip of salt pork to prevent burning. Place on rack in dripping pan with a bowl in center of the crown to preserve its shape. Dredge with flour, sprinkle with salt and pepper, basting frequently, and allowing nine minutes to the pound for roasting.
Serve on hot platter, with potato balls, green peas, French fried potatoes, or purée of chestnuts in center of crown. Paper frills on chop bones and parsley around the base.
Breaded Lamb or Mutton Chops Prepare loin or French chops as for broiling. Dip in crumbs, egg and crumb, and fry in deep fat. Drain on brown paper and serve.
Stuffed Lamb or Mutton Chop, with Spanish Sauce Prepare French chops. Cut through meat to the bone, making a pocket; fill pocket with mushroom mixture; close with skewer; and broil.
A crown roast is more assembly than cookery, and the instructions assume a cook who already knows how to french a rib and judge a fire. The gaps worth filling are temperature, doneness and what to do with the hollow centre.
- No oven temperature is givenLowney's readers judged by feel. Roast at 450F for the first 15 minutes to set the surface, then drop to 325-350F for the remainder.
- Nine minutes to the pound is aggressiveNine minutes to the pound is fast by modern standards -- that timing suits a lamb crown taken to rare or medium-rare, rather than the well-done mutton many of this book's readers may have preferred. Rather than trusting the clock, pull the roast at 130-135F in the thickest part of a rib, away from bone; it will rise several degrees resting. A 12-16 rib crown of about 6-8 lb serves 6 to 8.
- "Prepare the loin as for French chops"That means scraping the last inch or two of each rib bone clean of meat and fat, then cutting between the ribs partway down so the rack will bend. Ask a butcher for a frenched rack, or two racks tied into a circle, and you have skipped the hardest step.
- Rolling the loin backwardThe ribs bow outward and the meaty side faces in, which is the opposite of what looks natural. If it fights you, score the fat side between ribs a little deeper. Butcher's twine wrapped twice around the circumference, once near the base and once mid-height, holds it.
- Salt pork on the bone tipsIt works, but a cap of foil folded over each rib end does the same job with no fuss. The frills go on at serving time only, over bones that have been wiped clean of drippings.
- The bowl in the centreIts only purpose is to keep the crown from collapsing inward; a tightly crumpled ball of foil is easier. Do not put stuffing or the potatoes in the cavity while it roasts, since food packed against raw meat neither cooks nor browns properly. Fill the centre after the roast has come out and rested 15 minutes.
- MuttonSheep over about two years old, with a strong, slightly gamy flavour, and effectively absent from American retail meat cases. Any modern crown roast will be lamb, which cooks faster and tastes milder; if you find true mutton, expect it to want the lower end of the oven range and longer.
- Deep fat for the breaded chopsTake it to 360-375F. "Egg and crumb" means the sequence crumbs, beaten egg, crumbs again, which is what makes the coating hold. Drain on a rack rather than brown paper.
- Spanish sauceIn American cookbooks of this period the name is used loosely, sometimes for a tomato sauce with onion, sweet pepper and often mushroom, sometimes for the French sauce espagnole. The stuffed chop is the only item here that is broiled rather than roasted or fried, and a thick French chop needs about 6 minutes a side.
The crown roast belongs to the era of the elaborate dinner-table centrepiece, when a joint was expected to arrive looking like architecture and a household could afford a butcher's labour. Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard and published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, is best remembered for its chocolate and confectionery chapters, but like other promotional cookbooks of the period it was built out as a complete household manual, so the meat chapter runs through the standard American repertoire of the day. The pairing of crown roast with mutton rather than lamb is the real period marker: mature sheep was still ordinary eating in 1907, and the paper frills, potato balls and puree of chestnuts echo the French service that Fannie Farmer and the Boston Cooking School had made the aspirational standard in American kitchens. The frills themselves, generally traced to nineteenth-century French practice, are often said to have been originally practical, giving the carver something clean to grip.