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Meats (Cut the chops about an inch)
Cut the chops about an inch thick from the end of the haunch or the best end of the neck, flatten them a little with a cutlet-bat, trim them without waste, season with pepper and salt and broil them on a gridiron over a clear fire of moderate heat, turning them over every 3 minutes while on the fire; when done through with their gravy in them, lift them carefully off the gridiron without spilling the gravy that may be swimming on the surface, dish them up with a little rich brown gravy under them , and serve some currant jelly or venison sweet sauce separately in a boat.
Fricassee of Chickens with Mushrooms, etc. serve. tons of fried bread cut in the shape of hearts, and the form of olives, crayfish-tails, button-onions, or
A broiled chop with sweet sauce, almost certainly venison given the haunch and the currant jelly. The text has been damaged in setting: the final sentence breaks off into fragments of two neighbouring recipes and can be ignored.
- What meat this is"Haunch" and "best end of the neck" plus currant jelly point to venison. The same method works for lamb loin or rib chops; modern farmed venison loin chops are usually thinner than an inch, so buy them cut to order or use a thick-cut lamb chop.
- Cutlet-batA flat, heavy metal or wooden mallet used to even out thickness, not to tenderise. The back of a heavy knife or a lightly used meat mallet does the job. Flatten only slightly; venison chops pounded thin will dry out.
- Gridiron over a clear fireA grate set over embers that have burned down past flame, so the fat does not catch. A charcoal grill after the coals have greyed, or a ridged cast-iron pan over medium-high heat, gives the same steady radiant heat.
- Turning every three minutesThe recipe gives only the turning interval, not a total time. Venison is lean and is generally taken to 125-130F internal, roughly 3-4 minutes a side over a hot grate; lamb chops of the same thickness want 130-135F. "Done through" here suggests a period preference for cooked-through game.
- Keeping the gravy inThe instruction to lift the chops without spilling what has pooled on the surface is the hinge. Handle with tongs under the bone rather than a fork through the meat, and rest them on the serving dish rather than a rack so nothing is lost.
- Rich brown gravyIn this period, a reduced brown stock thickened lightly with a browned flour-and-butter roux. A reduced veal or beef stock, or the pan juices deglazed with stock and a little red wine, serves.
- Venison sweet sauceTypically port or claret reduced with redcurrant jelly, often with a strip of orange or lemon peel and sometimes a little spice. Here it is served separately in a boat, as the recipe directs.
- YieldTwo chops per person for venison loin, three for smaller lamb chops. As written the recipe is scaled to whatever the haunch or neck yields.
- The garbled tail"Fricassee of Chickens with Mushrooms" and the croutons cut in hearts and olive shapes belong to other entries that have run together in the printing. They are not part of this dish.
Broiled game chops with currant jelly belong to the nineteenth-century English tradition of treating venison as something between butcher's meat and a luxury. The pairing of red meat with a sweet fruit preserve is much older than the book, and is generally traced to medieval and Tudor cookery, where sugar, dried fruit and spice sat freely alongside meat; by the nineteenth century it had narrowed to a few survivals, of which venison with redcurrant is the best known. The insistence on a "clear fire" reflects a real constraint of open-hearth cooking, where a smoky or flaring fire would taint the meat before it cooked; the carefully cut heart- and olive-shaped fried bread mentioned in the run-on text at the end is a reminder that garnish in this period was expected to be shaped by hand, dish by dish.