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Lamb Chops with Brown Sauce
Cut a few lamb chops about one-fourth of an inch thick, trim nicely, dip them in beaten egg, then roll them in a seasoning of finely minced parsley, a little salt and pepper, lemon peel, and a small quantity of grated nutmeg. Heat a large lump of butter in a deep fryingpan over the fire, then put in the chops, and fry until well browned. Put one tablespoonful of flour and a small lump of butter into a stewpan, stir over the fire, then pour in one-half pint of clear veal gravy, and stir until boiling; drain the chops, put them on a hot dish, stir in one wineglassful of red wine with the sauce, strain it over the chops, and serve.
A quick sauté with a pan-side sauce, written for a kitchen where veal stock was always at hand. Two things decide whether it works: the thinness of the chops and the quality of the gravy.
- Chop thickness is the hingeA quarter-inch lamb chop cooks through in roughly a minute a side in hot butter. Ask the butcher to cut them thin from the rib or loin, or flatten thicker chops gently; a modern inch-thick chop treated this way will still be raw when the coating has burned.
- The coating has no crumbsThe chops are dipped in egg and then rolled in seasoning alone — parsley, salt, pepper, grated lemon zest, nutmeg. Expect a thin herb crust, not a breaded one. Use about 2 tablespoons minced parsley, the zest of half a lemon and a bare pinch of nutmeg for four to six chops.
- "A large lump of butter"Read it as 2 to 3 tablespoons in the frying pan, and about 1 tablespoon for the roux in the stewpan. Clarified butter or butter cut with a little oil browns the egg coating without the milk solids scorching.
- Clear veal gravyThis is unthickened brown veal stock. A good store-bought veal or beef stock works, or 1 cup of water with a spoonful of demi-glace. Half a pint is 1 cup, which yields a modest sauce for four.
- WineglassfulIn cookbooks of this period a wineglass is roughly 2 fluid ounces, a scant quarter cup. Add the red wine to the finished sauce and let it come back to a simmer for a minute so the raw edge cooks off before straining.
- Strain, then sauceStraining is not fussiness — it catches flour lumps and any scraps of herb, giving the smooth glossy coat the dish is built around. Sauce the chops at the table or immediately before serving so the crust does not soften.
- YieldThe recipe specifies only 'a few' chops; half a pint of gravy suits roughly four to six thin ones, giving two servings as a main course, four as part of a longer menu.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the working repertoire of a large hotel kitchen around 1896, and this recipe shows how that kitchen economized: a pan of chops, a spoonful of flour, and a ladle of veal stock. The pairing of lemon peel, parsley and nutmeg in an egg dip is older than the Waldorf — it belongs to a long English and Anglo-American tradition of "seasoned" cutlets that runs back through the eighteenth-century cookery books, where grated nutmeg was commonly used with mutton and veal as well as in sweet dishes. What marks the dish as hotel cooking is the assumption of a stock pot: a home cook of the same date would have had to make the veal gravy first, and many nineteenth-century household manuals open with a chapter of foundation broths before they let you near a chop.