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Fried Lamb Chops
Pare six lamb chops and split them through the center. Fill the inside with some very fine salpicon, season with salt and pepper, close together and dip in beaten eggs, then in fresh breadcrumbs; fry for four minutes on each side in two ounces of clarified butter, and serve with one gill of hot Montglas sauce, after arranging a curled paper at the end of each chop. Lamb Chops, Maintenon Style Select six well trimmed and flattened lamb chops, season with a pinch of salt and a half a pinch of pepper, place them in a stewpan, with one ounce of butter, and fry on one side only for one minute. Cover the cooked side with a chicken forcemeat. Sprinkle over them a finely minced truffle, put them on a well-buttered baking dish, and place them in a slow oven for four minutes. Place a paper frill on the end of each chop, and serve with one-half pint of hot clear veloute-sauce poured on the dish, and the chops laid on that.
Two chop preparations run together in one entry, both of them Escoffier-era restaurant cooking written for cooks who already had the sauces and forcemeats standing by. The vocabulary is the main obstacle, not the technique.
- SalpiconA salpicon is a mixture of ingredients cut into small, even dice and bound with a thick sauce — here typically tongue, mushroom and truffle in a reduced demi-glace. It must be cold and stiff before it goes into the chop, or it will run out during frying.
- Montglas sauceMontglas (also Montglas garnish) is generally a Madeira-finished demi-glace carrying the same tongue-and-truffle elements as the filling, diced small. If you are not making a classical brown sauce from scratch, a well-reduced veal or beef jus with Madeira stands in honestly.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. The half pint of velouté in the second recipe is a full cup, poured onto the plate as a bed rather than over the chops.
- Splitting the chopCut a horizontal pocket through the meat of the loin or rib chop, working from the fat side toward the bone but not through it. A partly frozen chop is far easier to split cleanly than a fully thawed one.
- Clarified butterTwo ounces is four tablespoons. Butterfat with the milk solids removed is used because whole butter would blacken before the breadcrumb coat browned; ghee, which is taken a stage further, will do the same job.
- The forcemeat is the hingeIn the Maintenon chops the raw chicken forcemeat is the only genuinely undercooked element — four minutes in a slow oven will not carry it through. Spread it thin, no more than a quarter inch, and cook until the forcemeat itself reaches 165F, whatever the stated time says.
- Slow ovenRoughly 300F; period 'slow' ovens are usually read as somewhere between 250F and 325F.
- Frying timeFour minutes a side suits a thick, stuffed, breaded chop and will bring it well past pink. For a plain modern chop of an inch or less, three minutes a side is closer to medium.
- Paper frillsThe curled paper cuff slipped over the bone end is service dressing; it is optional and affects nothing on the plate.
- YieldSix chops, two per person as a main course for three, or one apiece as a course in a longer menu.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is a working record of what a large American hotel kitchen cooked at the end of the century, and that kitchen cooked French. The Maintenon preparation — chops or cutlets masked with forcemeat and finished under gentle heat — is named for Madame de Maintenon, second wife of Louis XIV, and is generally traced to the eighteenth-century French court kitchens rather than to any documented dish of her own; the attribution is traditional, as most such names are. Montglas likewise carries an aristocratic surname attached to a garnish of tongue and truffle in Madeira, one of dozens of such coded names a nineteenth-century cook was expected to read as a full set of instructions. The two recipes together show how compressed professional writing of the period could be: neither tells you how to make the salpicon, the forcemeat, the velouté or the demi-glace, because a man reading it at the Waldorf range already had all four within arm's reach.