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Cotelettes of Mutton, Avignonnaise
Trim and neatly flatten six French mutton cotelettes, season all around with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Lightly roll in melted butter, then in bread crumbs, arrange on a broiler and broil five minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish, one overlapping another, crown-like. Place green peas Avignonnaise in the centre of the crown, pour a gill hot demi-glace around the chops and serve.
A plate of crumbed chops stood up in a crown, with peas in the middle and sauce poured around — a Delmonico's-style presentation reduced to five lines. Two things need attention: the meat itself, and the fact that two of the components are recipes elsewhere in the book.
- Mutton, and what to use insteadMutton is meat from a sheep over about two years old, stronger and firmer than lamb, and effectively unavailable in American supermarkets. Six frenched lamb rib chops, about 1 inch thick, are the practical substitute; they will be milder and will cook slightly faster.
- "French cotelettes"This means rib chops with the bone scraped clean of meat and fat for the last inch or two, so the bones can lean against each other in the crown. Butchers sell them as frenched or as a rack you can cut down yourself.
- A gillHalf a cup in American measure. If you are working from a British source it is 5 fl oz, but in this book take it as 4 fl oz.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown veal stock sauce, made separately — the book gives it among the sauces. Good jarred or frozen demi-glace concentrate is a fair stand-in; thinned canned gravy is not, since the point is a glossy sauce that clings without swamping the crumbs.
- Peas AvignonnaiseAnother cross-reference, not something the chop recipe produces. Provencal garnishes carrying the name are generally built on garlic and often onion and a little pork fat, so a garlicky braise of peas is the right register if you are improvising.
- Broiling time and the crumbsFive minutes a side under a modern gas or electric broiler will scorch buttered crumbs before the centre is done. Set the rack 4 to 5 inches from the element rather than directly under it, and go by internal temperature: 130-135F for lamb chops with a pink centre. Mutton of this cut is best treated the same way; cooked through it turns dry and livery.
- Seasoning quantityA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper for six chops is a reasonable amount, since much of it stays on the surface. Season the meat before the butter, as the recipe directs, so it adheres.
- Building the crownThe chops must be dressed on a genuinely hot dish and leaned bone-up against one another quickly, or they slump. Pour the demi-glace around the base, never over the crumbs.
- YieldSix rib chops is a first course for six, or a main course for two to three.
The recipe comes from Alessandro Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906); Filippini had spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and the book's habit of naming a dish for a place and then cross-referencing its garnish is pure restaurant shorthand of that era. Avignonnaise simply means "in the style of Avignon," in Provence, and in nineteenth-century French garnish nomenclature such names were generally understood to signal garlic — the association is traditional rather than fixed by any authority, and cooks of the period used the place-names loosely. Mutton chops were then ordinary metropolitan eating rather than a curiosity: mature sheep still had a substantial place in American and British markets in this period, though lamb was gaining ground, and the crumbed-and-broiled chop, arranged crown-like around a vegetable, was the sort of plate that let a hotel kitchen turn a cheap cut into something with a French name on the menu.