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Breaded Lamb Chops, Pittsburg
Neatly flatten six tender lamb chops. Season them all around with three saltspoons salt and a half teaspoon white pepper. Broil fifteen very thin slices bacon for two minutes on each side, take them off and let get cold. Then pound them in a mortar to a dust, take up and place on a plate. Lightly butter both sides of the chops with melted butter, then roll in the bacon dust, lightly dip in beaten egg, and lastly in cracker dust. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, lay in the chops, and gently fry for five minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish, crown like, one overlapping another, and keep hot.
Finely chop two peeled and seeded red tomatoes, place in a saucepan with a light gill demi-glace, half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, a saltspoon salt, half saltspoon white pepper, and boil for five minutes; lightly mix, pour around the chops and serve.
A Delmonico-style crumbed chop with a three-stage coating — bacon dust, egg, cracker crumb — and a quick tomato-demi-glace poured around rather than over. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the measures and one of the timings need translating.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons is 3/4 teaspoon of salt for six chops. A gill is half a cup; "a light gill" means a scant half cup, roughly 100 ml of demi-glace.
- The bacon dust is the pointThe bacon must be broiled crisp and then cooled completely — warm bacon smears in the mortar instead of powdering. Fifteen very thin slices yields only a few tablespoons of dust. A spice grinder or a few pulses in a small food processor does the same job; stop before it turns to paste.
- Cracker dustPlain unsalted soda crackers or water biscuits crushed fine, not seasoned breadcrumbs and not panko. The texture is powdery rather than flaky, which is what lets the thin coating adhere and brown evenly in a shallow film of butter.
- Demi-glaceIn 1906 this meant a reduced brown veal stock finished with sauce espagnole. A good jarred or frozen demi-glace works; failing that, reduce a cup of strong brown stock to a scant half cup. Do not substitute thin beef broth, which will not cling to the plate.
- Cooking timeFive minutes a side, as written, will cook a thin rib or loin chop through to well done. For a 3/4-inch chop taken to about 130-135F for medium-rare and rested, expect appreciably less time in the pan. Thicker chops crumbed this way will scorch the coating before the centre is done -- sear both sides in the pan and finish them in a moderate oven.
- Butter alone will burnOne and a half tablespoons of butter over the ten minutes of frying will brown hard. Use clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, and keep the heat moderate so the bacon and cracker crust colours rather than blackens.
- The tomato garnishTwo tomatoes, peeled, seeded and finely chopped, simmered five minutes in the demi-glace. It should stay loose and spoonable — a sauce to pour around the base of the crown, not a coating for the chops, which would soften the crust.
- YieldSix chops serves three as a main course, or six as one course of a longer menu.
The International Cook Book is the work of Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, who filled it with several thousand recipes tagged with the names of cities, states and patrons — Pittsburg, Baltimore, Newport, and so on. The place names are largely decorative: they signalled cosmopolitan range to a readership buying cookbooks partly as reference and partly as aspiration, and few of them describe any genuine regional practice. What is real here is the method. Coating a chop in successive layers — fat, powdered cured meat, egg, crumb — is ordinary breading applied to a small cut, and the demi-glace poured around rather than over the meat is straight restaurant plating of the period, meant to keep a crisp crust crisp on its way to the table. The bacon dust is the flourish that earns the recipe its own entry; grinding crisped cured pork to a powder as a seasoning has come back into fashion in professional kitchens without much acknowledgement that it is well over a century old.