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Chops à la Castillane
Broil six lamb chops, arrange on slices of fried egg-plant, and pour around the following sauce: Brown three tablespoons butter, add three and one-half tablespoons flour, and stir until well browned; then add, gradually, one cup rich Brown Stock. Cook three tablespoons lean raw ham cut in small cubes in one-half tablespoon butter two minutes. Moisten with two tablespoons Sherry wine, and add to sauce with two tablespoons finely shredded green pepper. Season with salt and pepper.
A straightforward broil-and-sauce dish; the only fussy part is the brown roux, which wants patience rather than heat.
- The hinge: the rouxButter and flour must be cooked to a genuine nut brown over moderate heat before any stock goes in — that browning is the whole flavour of the sauce. If it scorches or smells acrid, start again; burnt roux cannot be rescued and will make the finished sauce bitter.
- Brown StockFarmer's Brown Stock is beef shin and bone browned before simmering. A good reduced beef stock or dark veal stock stands in; if using commercial stock, choose an unsalted one and hold back on salt, since a cup of sauce reduces enough to concentrate anything already in it.
- Chops and donenessSix loin or rib chops, cut about an inch thick, want 3–4 minutes a side under a hot broiler or on a grill pan for medium-rare (130–135F internal). Period broiling directions tend to run longer than modern taste requires.
- Egg-plantSlice about half an inch thick, salt for 20 minutes and blot, then flour or crumb and fry in shallow oil until golden. Salting matters less with modern low-bitterness varieties but still firms the slices so they absorb less fat.
- Lean raw hamThis means uncooked cured ham — prosciutto, speck or a piece of country ham — not deli boiled ham. Two minutes in butter is only to release its fat and salt, not to brown it hard.
- Green pepperShredded green bell pepper goes in at the end and stays slightly crisp. Sherry should be a dry fino or amontillado, not cream sherry; add it to the ham pan so the alcohol cooks off before the sauce is finished.
- YieldServes three as written, two chops each, or six as part of a larger menu. The sauce comes to roughly a cup and thickens as it stands — loosen with a spoonful of stock.
Nineteenth-century menu French attached place names to garnishes with fairly loose logic, and "à la Castillane" — after Castile — signals the Spanish register of the plate: fried aubergine, sweet pepper, cured ham and sherry, all set around a brown sauce built in the standard French manner. Fannie Farmer's cookbook is full of these constructions, borrowed from the elaborate hotel and restaurant cookery of the day and scaled down for a household cook with one range and no brigade. The dish also shows how thoroughly the espagnole family of brown sauces had settled into American cooking-school teaching: the roux, the stock, the wine-moistened garnish worked in at the end.