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Chop Plate Dinner
Broil any kind of chops till tender, crisp and juicy. Season well. Cut thick slice from stem end of green peppers, remove seeds and parboil 15 minutes in boiling salted water. Drain. Fill each pepper case with left-over combination of vegetables. Rice freshly boiled or left-over mashed potatoes. Add enough hot milk to barely moisten, season with salt, pepper, paprika and butter or margarine. Mold the potato with an ice cream scoop. Serve one chop, one filled green pepper case and one potato ball or pyramid to each person. Garnish top of potato with radish rose.
This is an assembly plan rather than a strict recipe: a broiled chop, a stuffed pepper and a scoop of potato arranged on one plate. The instructions assume you already have cooked vegetables on hand.
- The hinge: everything must be hot at onceThe three components are cooked separately and meet only on the plate. Fill and reheat the peppers first, hold them in a 300F oven, then broil the chops and scoop the potato last so nothing arrives lukewarm.
- Parboiling the peppersFifteen minutes in boiling water is likely to over-soften a modern thin-walled bell pepper. Three to five minutes is usually enough to soften the case while it still stands up on the plate.
- The filling is not cooked furtherThe recipe fills the parboiled cases with already-cooked vegetables and serves them. If your leftovers are cold, heat the filling through separately, or set the filled peppers in a 375F oven for 10-15 minutes.
- "Rice freshly boiled"To rice potatoes is to push them through a ricer or food mill; the line means freshly boiled potatoes put through a ricer, or leftover mashed potatoes, moistened with hot milk. Add the milk a spoonful at a time -- the mixture must stay stiff enough to hold a scooped shape.
- Chops and donenessPork chops are done at 145F internal with a short rest; lamb chops take 130-135F for medium-rare. Cut from the loin at about an inch thick and broil 4-6 minutes a side, close under the element.
- Margarine'Butter or margarine' was a routine alternative in American cookbooks of the mid-century decades, when margarine was the cheaper fat; the phrase alone does not date the book to a particular year. Modern stick margarine works; whipped tub spreads carry more water and will slacken the potato.
- Molding the potatoA No. 12 or No. 16 ice cream scoop dipped in hot water releases cleanly. A pyramid can be shaped with two wetted spoons if you prefer the older presentation.
- YieldOne chop, one pepper and one potato ball per person -- scale directly. Figure one medium potato and one large pepper per diner, plus about a cup of cooked vegetables for every two peppers.
- The radish roseTrim the root end flat, cut four or five thin petals from the top down toward the stem without severing them, and drop the radish in ice water for 20 minutes to open.
A chop plate is a large flat serving platter. Here the whole dinner is arranged on one plate -- a chop, a vegetable case and a molded starch -- rather than passed in separate dishes, though whether the title points to the platter or simply to the chop on it is not clear from the recipe itself. The economy underneath the styling is plainer: leftover vegetables and leftover mashed potato are given a second appearance, dressed up with an ice cream scoop and a radish rose.