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Chops en Papillote
Finely chop the whites of three "hard-boiled" eggs and force yolks through potato ricer, mix, and add to three common crackers, rolled and sifted; then add three tablespoons melted butter, salt, pepper, and onion juice, to taste. Add enough cream to make of right consistency to spread. Cover chops thinly with mixture and wrap in buttered paper cases. Bake twenty-five minutes in hot oven. move from cases, place on hot platter, and garnish with parsley.
A lamb chop given a bound egg-and-cracker coating and baked in a paper case, which steams as much as it roasts. The two things to get right are the paper and the timing.
- The paper caseUse parchment, cut in a large heart or oval, folded over the chop and crimped shut along the curve; butter the inside as directed. Do not substitute waxed paper, which melts and smokes, or foil, which defeats the point of a papillote.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no numbers; a nineteenth-century hot oven is generally reckoned at somewhere around 400-450F. The paper protects the coating from scorching at that heat.
- Common crackersThe hard, plain, dry rounds associated with Montpelier, Vermont and sold across New England. Three of them rolled and sifted give somewhere in the region of half to three-quarters of a cup of fine crumbs; plain water crackers or saltines with unsalted tops are the closest current stand-ins, and with salted crackers you should go easy on added salt.
- Onion juiceGrate a piece of onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or press a wedge in a garlic press. A teaspoon is plenty for this quantity.
- TimingTwenty-five minutes suits thick loin or rib chops cut a good inch and a quarter. Thin supermarket chops will be grey and dry well before that; pull them at 130–135F internal for medium-rare and let the paper hold the heat while you carry them to the table.
- Consistency of the coatingAdd the cream a spoonful at a time. The mixture should hold its shape like a stiff stuffing, not pour; too loose and it slides off the chop inside the case.
- ColourNothing browns inside paper. If you want colour, sear the chops briefly in a hot pan before coating, or slit the cases open for the last few minutes.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number of chops; the quantity of coating looks like enough for roughly half a dozen. Serve the chops out of the cases as instructed, or bring them to the table sealed and cut them open there.
En papillote -- cooking in a paper wrapper -- is a French technique that English and American cookbooks adopted through the nineteenth century. The buttered paper case both kept the coating in place and let the dish arrive at table with a small piece of theatre. Common crackers, hard plain rounds baked in New England from the early nineteenth century and long a pantry staple in Vermont and Massachusetts, do the work elsewhere done by dried breadcrumbs -- crumbs, thickening, stuffing. If the recipe sits under a "Lamb and Mutton" heading, that is a reminder that mature mutton was still ordinary American meat at the end of the century, and that a mild binder with cream and onion juice rather than raw onion would flatter a strong-tasting chop as much as a delicate one.