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Breaded Lamb Chops, Signora
Neatly trim and lightly flatten six French lamb chops, season with a half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, and lightly roll them in flour, then dip in beaten egg and lightly roll in bread crumbs. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in frying pan, arrange the chops in pan one beside another and fry for four minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish, one overlapping another crown-like, pour a Perigueux sauce around, fill the centre with French peas, adjust a paper curl at the end of each chop and serve. Monday, Second Week of September
A straightforward breaded chop, but the two sauces and the presentation carry it, and the frying time needs adjusting for modern chops.
- French chopsThese are rib chops with the bone scraped clean of meat and fat for an inch or two, which is what allows the paper frill at the end. Ask the butcher to French a rack and cut it into chops, or buy a rack and do it yourself.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three is about 3/4 teaspoon of pepper for six chops. That is a generous but deliberate amount against the bland breading.
- The frying timeFour minutes a side suited the thin chops of the period. A modern chop cut 3/4 to 1 inch thick will be well past pink at eight minutes total; go by an internal temperature of 130-135F for medium-rare and expect roughly three minutes a side over medium heat.
- Butter will burnTwo tablespoons of plain butter at breading temperature scorches before the second side is done. Clarified butter, or butter cut with a spoonful of neutral oil, holds up and browns the crumbs evenly.
- Perigueux sauceA demi-glace finished with Madeira and chopped truffle, named for Perigueux in the Perigord truffle country. Truffle at these quantities is now an expensive proposition; a good reduced veal demi-glace with Madeira is the honest substitute, and truffle paste stirred in at the end does more than truffle oil.
- French peasPetits pois, small and sweet, sometimes stewed with butter, a little lettuce and a pinch of sugar rather than plain boiled. Frozen petits pois are entirely acceptable here and better than large fresh peas.
- Paper curlA cutlet frill, or manchette, a strip of paper folded and cut into a fringe then wrapped around the bare bone. Decorative only, and it must go on after frying.
- YieldSix chops arranged in a crown serves two to three as a main course, or six as a first course at a longer dinner.
The recipe belongs to the era of grande cuisine service, when a plated dish was expected to have architecture: chops leaning against one another in a ring, a moat of dark sauce, a vegetable filling the middle, paper frills marking each bone. Perigueux sauce anchors it to the classical French repertoire, its name taken from the capital of the Perigord, the region whose black truffles supplied restaurant kitchens across Europe and America. The "Signora" in the title is the kind of dedication or house name that ran through such collections, sometimes honoring a patron and sometimes simply distinguishing one breaded chop from the dozen others in the book. Such a title says less about Italy than about the period's habit of scattering foreign labels across a fundamentally French professional cuisine.