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Lamb Chops with Soubise Sauce
Prepare eight French chops. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, spread with soubise sauce, and broil.
Three lines of instruction that assume you already know how to butcher, sauce and broil. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- French chopsRib chops with the meat and fat scraped from the last inch or so of bone. Any butcher will do this, or you can trim it yourself with a boning knife; cut them a good inch thick so they survive the broiler.
- Soubise, and which kindSoubise is onion purée, in this period usually onions stewed soft in butter and bound with thick béchamel or with rice cooked in the onion. For spreading on a chop you want the stiff version, thick enough to hold on the meat, not a pouring sauce. The book expects you to have made it already from another page.
- The hingeA sauce spread on meat under a broiler will scorch long before the chop is done. Keep the rack lower than usual, or broil the first side bare and spread the coating on the turned side for the last few minutes so it colors rather than blackens.
- Heat and timeA hot broiler, rack about four inches from the element. Inch-thick chops take roughly 4 to 5 minutes a side for pink at the bone, 130-135F on an instant-read thermometer at the thickest point, away from bone.
- Coal-range broilingBroiling at this date could still mean a hinged wire broiler held over live coals, which browns from below and lets fat drip clear, though gas ranges with broiling compartments were also in use. Under a modern overhead element, set the chops on a rack over a sheet pan so rendered fat does not pool and smoke.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper go on the meat before the sauce, as written. The soubise itself should be seasoned separately; onion purée swallows salt.
- YieldEight chops serves four as a main course, or eight as a first course with the chop standing on its bared bone.
Soubise is generally traced to the household of Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, an eighteenth-century French marshal whose kitchen lent its name to the onion purée, though as with most such attributions the link is traditional rather than documented. By the time this recipe was printed, soubise had long since passed into the standard Anglo-American repertoire of "French" sauces that a well-run household cook was expected to have at hand, which is why the instruction here is simply "spread with soubise sauce" with no further explanation. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other corporate cookbooks of its era it padded out its chocolate formulas with a full general-purpose kitchen manual; the meat chapter reads like any competent turn-of-the-century American cookery book, terse because it assumed a reader who had already worked through the sauces.