French Chops
These are cut from the ribs and trimmed by the butcher, who removes all the fat and scrapes the bones clean for a little distance from the end. Broil over a quick fire, adding salt, pepper and butter before serving. They may also be cooked by frying, in which case they are first seasoned with salt and pepper and dipped in beaten egg and then in cracker crumbs.
A four-line instruction for what a butcher today would call frenched rib chops. The technique is sound; what the original leaves out is heat management and any notion of doneness.
- What "French chops" meansRib chops — lamb, most often, though the same treatment was applied to veal — with the fat and meat scraped from the last inch or two of bone. The text itself does not name the meat. Ask for a frenched rack and have it cut into chops, or buy a rack and do it yourself with a boning knife.
- "A quick fire"A hot, direct heat: a broiler fully preheated for ten minutes, or a grill or heavy pan at high heat. The point is a fast crust on a chop that is only an inch or so thick, not slow cooking through.
- Timing and donenessThe original gives none. An inch-thick lamb chop takes roughly 3 to 4 minutes a side under a hot broiler for medium-rare, 135F at the centre. Veal rib chops are better taken to 145F. Rest five minutes before serving.
- Butter at the endThe text gives no reason, but adding butter "before serving" rather than during cooking makes practical sense over a quick fire, where it would only burn. A pat melted over the hot chops off the heat, with the salt and pepper, is the whole of the sauce.
- Season earlier than the text saysSalting broiled chops half an hour ahead, or the night before, gives better seasoning and a drier surface that browns faster. The instruction to salt at the end may reflect the older idea that salt draws out the juices, though the text does not say so.
- The fried versionSeason, dip in beaten egg, then in cracker crumbs — fine dry crumbs, soda crackers being the usual sort. Fry in about a quarter inch of butter or oil over medium-high heat, and drain on paper. Egg-and-crumb frying of this kind turns up often in period recipes for veal.
- YieldFrenched rib chops are small. Allow two to three per person as a main course; a rack of lamb yields seven or eight.
- The bone frillPeriod service put a paper frill on each scraped bone so guests could pick the chop up. Purely decorative, and easily skipped.
The Butterick Cook Book of 1911 came from a pattern and fashion publisher, and its meat chapter assumes a household with a butcher who will do the knife work — here the trimming and scraping are handed off entirely, and the cook's job begins at the fire. "Frenching" a chop, exposing and cleaning the rib bone, is by tradition attributed to French restaurant practice of the nineteenth century, where it made the chop neat enough to be picked up by the bone at table and gave a place to fix the paper frill. The instruction to broil over a quick fire and add butter only at the end belongs to the coal- and wood-range era, when a cook judged heat by holding a hand over the grate rather than by a dial.