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Lamb Chops à la Marseilles
Pan broil, on one side, six French chops, cover cooked side with Mushroom Sauce, place in a buttered bakingdish, and bake in a hot oven eight minutes. Remove to serving dish, place a paper frill on each chop, and garnish with parsley.
Mushroom Sauce. Brown one and one-half tablespoons butter, add three tablespoons flour, and stir until well browned; then add one-half cup highly seasoned Brown Stock. Add one-fourth cup chopped canned mushrooms, and season with salt and pepper.
A quick composed chop dish from Farmer's book: pan-browned on one side, masked with a stiff mushroom paste, and finished in a fast oven. Two things need attention — the oven heat and the very thick sauce.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no thermometer reading; period "hot" is usually taken today as somewhere around 400-450F. Eight minutes at that heat is enough to set the sauce and finish a chop that is already seared on one side.
- French chopsRib chops with the bone scraped clean for an inch or two, which is what the paper frill covers. Any butcher will french a rack of lamb; ask for them cut about an inch thick so the interior is still pink after the bake.
- Pan broilDry-heat cooking in a heavy pan with no added fat — a hot cast-iron skillet, the chops turned only once. Here they are seared on one side only, then the raw side goes down in the baking dish.
- The sauce is a paste, not a pourThree tablespoons flour to half a cup of stock gives something closer to a thick spreadable mask, which is the point: it must sit on the chop rather than run off. If you want a sauce to serve alongside as well, make a second batch with two to three times the stock.
- Brown the roux properlyWith only a tablespoon and a half of butter to three of flour, the mixture is dry and scorches easily. Keep the heat moderate and stir constantly until it smells nutty and turns the colour of a hazelnut shell; a raw-flour taste is very obvious in a sauce this thick.
- Brown stockThe book's brown stock is a long-simmered beef stock in which part of the meat is browned first. A good reduced beef or veal stock works; "highly seasoned" is doing real work here, since half a cup is all the flavour the sauce gets.
- Canned mushroomsCommon in period American cookery, when fresh cultivated mushrooms were still an expensive item. Sauteed fresh mushrooms, chopped fine and cooked until their water has gone, give a better result -- wet mushrooms will thin the paste.
- Doneness and yieldSix chops serves two or three as a main course. Pull them at about 130–135°F at the centre for medium-rare; the sauce coating makes the surface look done well before the meat is.
French chops with paper frills and a brown mushroom mask belong to the late-nineteenth-century American appetite for restaurant French cooking, filtered through cooking-school teaching -- Fannie Farmer's book is full of dishes named "a la" something, the sort of naming that echoed the hotel and restaurant menus of the period rather than any regional French source. The Marseilles tag is decorative; there is nothing particularly Provencal here, no olive oil, tomato or garlic, and names of this kind were attached fairly loosely in period menus to signal a dish that had been dressed up. Also of its moment are the canned mushrooms: tinned goods were a modern convenience of the period, and Farmer specifies them without apology in a dish otherwise meant to look expensive.