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Lamb Chops with Perigueux Sauce
Pare neatly half a dozen chops, flatten, and season with one-half pinch of pepper and one pinch of salt. Make an incision on each chop, and garnish the inside with a truffle previously prepared by dipping in hot glaze, then dip the chops in beaten egg, roll them in fresh breadcrumbs, and put them in a stewpan with two ounces of butter, frying them for five minutes on either side. Pour one-half pint of Perigueux sauce on the dish, arrange the chops over it with curled paper on their ends, and serve.
A breaded rib chop stuffed with truffle and set on a truffled brown sauce — straightforward once the two French components, glaze and Périgueux sauce, are in hand.
- The chops"Pare neatly" means what a butcher now calls French-trimming: scrape the rib bone clean so the paper frill has somewhere to sit. The recipe gives neither a thickness nor a yield; half a dozen chops would make a plate for two or three.
- GlazeThe "hot glaze" is glace de viande, brown veal or beef stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A spoonful of reduced demi-glace or a good commercial glace does the same job: it seals the truffle slice and keeps it from drying in the pan.
- Périgueux sauceNot given in this passage. It is a Madeira-fortified demi-glace finished with chopped truffle, and it is where the dish's cost and character live. Half a pint is one cup, which is generous for six chops — enough to pool the platter.
- TruffleOscar presumably assumed fresh black truffle. Preserved truffle in a jar behaves similarly here, since it is warmed rather than served raw; truffle oil or paste will not read the same way inside the meat.
- StewpanIn 1896 a stewpan is a straight-sided pan on the range top, not an oven dish. Use a heavy skillet wide enough that the six chops do not touch, or the crumb crust steams instead of browning.
- TimingFive minutes a side in two ounces of butter over moderate heat browns the crumbs and takes a thick chop to medium. If your chops are thinner than an inch, cut it to three minutes a side — the coating dictates the schedule, and overcooked breaded lamb goes grey and dry inside its shell.
- ButterTwo ounces of plain butter at frying heat will darken past the point the crumbs need. Clarify it, or add a spoonful of neutral oil, and wipe the pan between batches if you cook in two goes.
- The paper frills"Curled paper on their ends" are papillotes, cut from a folded strip of parchment and slipped over the scraped bone. Purely decorative, and purely of the period.
Périgueux sauce takes its name from the capital of the Périgord, the region of southwestern France whose black truffles were, and are, the point of the reference; the sauce is simply a rich brown sauce made to carry them, usually with Madeira. Oscar Tschirky's book belongs to the era when American hotel dining leaned heavily on the vocabulary of French haute cuisine, and a dish like this shows the pattern clearly: a plain cut of meat, an expensive garnish tucked out of sight, a named sauce, and a paper ruffle to signal that the kitchen knew the form. The reliance on glace de viande also marks it as a professional recipe — a hotel brigade was presumably expected to have reduced stock on hand, which is why the instruction to dip a truffle "in hot glaze" needs no further explanation here.