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Broiled Mutton Chops
Cut the chops from the loin or from the rack and remove some of the fat if necessary. Sprinkle slightly with pepper, put them on a gridiron over a good clear fire, turning two or three times, and cook evenly. When done put them on a hot dish, sprinkle lightly with salt, put a small lump of butter on each and serve very hot. Garnish with sliced okras and stuffed egg plants. Broiled Mutton Chops, Brittany Style Pare six mutton chops, season with one tablespoonful of salt and pepper and pour a few drops of oil over each. Broil four minutes on each side, place on a dish and serve with one-half pint of puree of white beans mixed with two tablespoonfuls of hot meat glaze.
Broiled Mutton Chops, Provincial Style Flatten and pare nicely six mutton chops and season them with a little salt and pepper; oil slightly with sweet oil and then either boil or cook them in a stewpan for two minutes, on one side only, and lay them aside to get cold. Spread over them some provincial garnishing to about one-fourth inch in thickness and sprinkle with breadcrumbs mixed with a little grated Parmesan cheese. Place the chops carefully in a well-buttered pan, pour over them a little clarified butter and place in a very hot oven for five minutes or until of a good color. Serve with one-half pint of hot veloute sauce in a sauceboat. Broiled Mutton Chops, Soyer Take five pounds of saddle of mutton, cut and saw it crosswise into six pieces, flatten, pare, and trim them, season with one tablespoonful of salt and one teaspoonful of pepper. Broil them for six minutes on each side, then place them on a hot dish, and serve with a garnishing of a pint of fried potatoes placed around the dish.
Four variations on the same chop, written for a kitchen with a live coal fire, a stock pot always at the ready, and a butcher on the premises. The essentials translate cleanly; a few of the ingredients do not.
- Mutton itselfTrue mutton — sheep generally over a year old — is rarely sold in American markets. Lamb loin or rib chops are the practical substitute; they are milder and cook faster, so treat the stated times as an upper limit. If you find real mutton at a halal or specialty butcher, expect a stronger flavor and slightly longer cooking.
- The saltA tablespoon of salt for six chops is heavy-handed by modern taste, and in the Brittany version it is compounded by the bean puree and the meat glaze, both of which carry their own salt. Season to your own judgment and taste the puree before it reaches the plate.
- Gridiron over a clear fire"A good clear fire" means coals that have burned down past the flame stage, not a live blaze. A charcoal grill at high heat or a heavy ridged pan over a strong burner both work. Chops about an inch thick want roughly 4 to 5 minutes a side, or 130-135F internal for medium-rare.
- Salt after, butter on topThe first version's order is deliberate: pepper before the fire, salt and a lump of butter after. The butter melting on a hot chop is the sauce, and it is why the recipe insists the dish be hot and the chops served very hot.
- Meat glazeGlace de viande — brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. Commercial demi-glace concentrate is the closest thing on a supermarket shelf; two tablespoons stirred into the bean puree is doing the work of both seasoning and body.
- Sweet oil and velouteSweet oil is olive oil. Veloute is the white stock sauce — chicken or veal stock thickened with a blond roux — and half a pint is a cup, served separately in a sauceboat rather than poured over the crust.
- "Provincial garnishing"Oscar assumes his reader knows the preparation; the book does not define it here. It may be some form of Provencale mixture — chopped mushrooms, garlic and parsley are the usual candidates — bound stiff enough to spread, but this is inference, not a documented reading. Treat the quarter-inch layer as the fixed point and build a paste that will hold it.
- The very hot ovenFor the Provincial chops, 450-475F. The chops are already part-cooked and cold; the oven is only there to set the crust and color the crumbs, which is why five minutes is enough.
- Soyer's saddleSawing a five-pound saddle crosswise into six pieces yields double loin chops with bone through the middle — what an English butcher calls a Barnsley chop. Ask for them cut to order; a home cook cannot saw them cleanly.
- YieldThree of the four variations specify six chops; the first gives no number. As a main course for modern appetites six will serve three to four.
The mutton chop was a fixture of nineteenth-century club and hotel dining on both sides of the Atlantic, plain enough to be ordered without thought and substantial enough to satisfy — the sort of dish a steward could put before a regular customer at any hour. What Oscar Tschirky does here is show how a hotel kitchen turned one plain item into four menu lines by changing nothing but the garnish: beans and glaze for Brittany, a crumbed Provencale crust for Provincial, fried potatoes for the last. The name attached to that last version honors Alexis Soyer (1810-1858), the French-born chef of London's Reform Club, whose cookbooks and public celebrity made him the best-known cook in the English-speaking world a generation before the Waldorf opened; naming a dish after him was standard practice rather than a claim that he wrote the recipe. The okra and eggplant garnish on the first chop is a reminder that the Waldorf's larder in the 1890s was already drawing on a wider range of vegetables than the English chophouse tradition it inherited.