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Broiled Lamb Chops in Papers
Trim the chops neatly, remove the skin and fat, dip them in warm butter, and then strew parsley and chives over them. Wrap them in sheets of buttered paper, and broil over a clear fire. When cooked pour the chops on a dish, and serve with gravy.
A terse Waldorf-era instruction for chops cooked en papillote over coals. The paper is the whole technique: it holds the butter and herbs against the meat and keeps the fire off it, so the choice of paper and the state of the fire matter more than anything else here.
- Use parchment, not waxed paperThe original assumes plain kitchen paper brushed with butter. Modern waxed paper melts and smokes; parchment is the direct equivalent. Cut a heart or rectangle roughly twice the width of the chop, butter it well, fold the edges over several times and crimp so no fat escapes into the fire.
- "A clear fire"This means a bed of charcoal or hardwood burned down to steady embers with no flame licking up. Flame can ignite a buttered paper parcel very quickly. On a gas grill, use medium-high with the flame not directly under the parcel; an oven at about 425F on a sheet pan for roughly 12 minutes is a workable substitute, though the recipe itself specifies neither time nor temperature.
- Which chopsProbably loin or rib chops, though the recipe does not say which cut or how thick; a thick chop of about 1 to 1 1/4 inches is a modern assumption rather than a stated one. Trimming off the skin and fat, as directed, means there is little direct fire contact to render fat, so any left on may stay flabby inside the paper.
- DonenessLoin chops of that thickness need roughly 4 to 5 minutes a side in the parcel for medium-rare, 130-135F at the center. The paper traps steam and shields the surface, so the meat takes little or no color; the browning here is minimal by design.
- "Pour the chops on a dish"An awkward phrase for turning the parcel out so the collected butter and herb juices go onto the plate with the meat. Either slit the paper at the table or open it over the dish so nothing is lost. Slitting at the table is worth doing for the burst of parsley and chive steam.
- The gravyIn a hotel kitchen this would most likely have been a spoonful of the day's brown sauce or reduced lamb stock. A simple pan reduction of stock with a little butter serves the same purpose; the dish does not want anything thick or floury over it.
- Herbs and butterFigure about a tablespoon of melted butter and a tablespoon of chopped parsley and chives per chop. "Warm butter" means melted and barely tepid, not hot — hot butter slides off rather than clinging.
- YieldTwo chops per person as a main course, one as part of a longer menu.
Cooking in a buttered paper case — en papillote, or "in papers" in nineteenth-century English menus — was a standard chophouse and hotel trick long before parchment was a supermarket item. The paper does two jobs at once: it shields delicate meat from the direct radiant heat of a coal grill, and it keeps the seasoned butter in contact with the surface instead of dripping into the fire. Veal cutlets and small game birds were treated the same way, and the technique is generally traced back through French practice, where côtelettes en papillote appear in the classic repertoire. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf dining rooms from 1893 and compiled this book in 1896, was writing for cooks who already knew what a clear fire looked like, which is why the instruction runs to three sentences and never mentions time or temperature at all.