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Chops à la Signora
Gash French Chops on outer edge, extending cut halfway through lean meat. Insert in each gash a slice of truffle, sprinkle with salt and pepper, wrap in calf's caul. Roll in flour, dip in egg, then in stale bread crumbs, and sauté in butter eight minutes, turning often. Place in oven four minutes to finish cooking. Arrange on hot platter for serving, and place on top of each a fresh broiled mushroom or mushroom baked in cream. To fat in pan add a small quantity of boiling water and pour around chops. This is a delicious way of cooking chops for a dinner party.
A Fannie Farmer party dish that reads oddly today only because two of its components have moved out of the ordinary grocery store. The technique itself — bread, sauté, finish in the oven — is sound and still worth doing.
- French chopsRib chops with the meat and fat scraped from the last inch or two of bone, what a butcher now calls frenched. Ask for single-bone rib chops cut about an inch thick; thinner chops will be dry by the end of the twelve minutes of cooking here.
- Calf's caulCaul fat, the lacy fatty membrane from around the stomach. It is still sold by whole-animal butchers and halal and Latin markets, usually frozen, usually from pork rather than veal. Soak frozen caul in cool water to unfold it without tearing, pat dry, and wrap in a single layer — it melts away in the pan and bastes the chop.
- If you cannot get caulThe chop can be breaded and cooked without it. It loses some richness and the truffle slices are less protected, so press them well into the gashes and keep the crumb coat intact when turning.
- TruffleCanned or bottled black truffle was a familiar pantry luxury in better-off households of the period, and a slice was often used for looks as much as flavour. A fresh or good jarred black truffle works; truffle oil does not, since the point is a solid slice held inside the meat.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A hot oven, around 400-425F, will finish the chops in a few minutes without further browning the crumbs.
- Doneness over timingEight minutes in butter plus four in the oven suits a thick chop taken to medium. The recipe does not say what meat the chops are; if lamb, an instant-read thermometer reading around 130-135F near the bone is more reliable than the clock, since chop thickness varies more than the recipe assumes.
- Butter that will not burnTwelve minutes of breadcrumbs in plain butter browns hard. Clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, keeps the crust from blackening while it sets.
- The pan sauceAdding boiling water to the fat is a deglaze in its plainest form: it lifts the browned bits and gives a thin, buttery jus. Stock instead of water, reduced for a minute, gives a better result and is entirely in keeping.
- YieldOne or two chops per person depending on size; the recipe scales by the chop. Mushrooms baked in cream can be done ahead and held warm while the chops fry.
This is the sort of entry that shows the Boston Cooking School's debt to professional French cookery, filtered for the American home. Crépinettes and other caul-wrapped preparations were common in nineteenth-century restaurant kitchens, where caul fat served as a self-basting, self-vanishing wrapper; a chop dressed with truffle and finished with a mushroom belongs squarely to the era's dinner-party repertoire. The name is anyone's guess — Italianate and French "à la" titles were attached freely to dishes in this period to signal elegance, and no Signora behind it has been identified. What is revealing is that the book expects a cook to reach for a truffle and a calf's caul without comment; caul was an unremarkable butcher's item, preserved truffle a purchase for those who could afford it, and it is the modern kitchen, not the old one, that finds both exotic.