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English Mutton Chops with Bacon
Prepare and broil six English mutton chops. Dress on a hot dish. Arrange twelve thin slices bacon, on top of them and serve.
Three lines of instruction that assume a cook who already knows what an English chop is and how a broiler behaves. The gaps worth filling are the cut, the heat, and the fact that the bacon has to be cooked separately.
- What an English chop isA thick loin chop cut across the saddle so it includes both loin and tenderloin, with the kidney sometimes still attached — roughly 1 to 1.5 inches thick and 6 to 8 oz. A butcher will cut them on request; supermarket loin chops are usually thinner and will overcook before they brown.
- "Broil" in 1900"Broil" in this period -- It means direct radiant heat — a gridiron over coals or under a gas salamander, not a baking dish. A modern overhead broiler on high with the rack 3-4 inches from the element, or a very hot grill pan, gives the same result.
- PrepareThe word most likely covers trimming the flap of fat and skin, and curling the tail of the loin around the eye of meat, secured with a skewer or a turn of string so the chop keeps a compact shape and cooks evenly; the recipe itself does not specify.
- Cook to temperature, not to timeMutton chops of this thickness want about 4-5 minutes a side, pulled at 130-135F for medium-rare to medium and rested five minutes. Mutton is stronger-flavoured than lamb; taken to well done it turns dry and assertively muttony.
- The bacon is cooked, not rawThe recipe does not say so, but period practice was to broil or fry the rashers and arrange them on top as a garnish; in any case do not lay raw bacon on cooked chops. Thin rashers rather than thick slices suit the dish.
- Hot dishNot a suggestion. A warmed platter matters here because both mutton fat and bacon fat congeal quickly, and the dish is served without sauce.
- YieldSix chops, two rashers each — six servings, or four generous ones. Traditional accompaniments would be watercress, a grilled tomato or mushroom, and plain boiled or fried potatoes.
The English mutton chop earned its own entry in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks at a time when the chophouse — the London and later New York eating house whose whole business was a grill, a cut of meat and a pot of beer — was a familiar institution. Mutton, meaning sheep slaughtered at a year or more rather than lamb, was the ordinary sheep meat of the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic; the shift in American taste toward young lamb came later, which is why a cut this book treats as everyday now requires a special order. Bacon laid over broiled meat was a standard device of the period, supplying fat and salt to a lean cut in place of a sauce, and the same logic runs through Victorian and Edwardian cooking as larding, barding and the bacon-wrapped bird. Its place in The International Cook Book says less about the dish than about the editorial habit of using national labels — this is English cooking as an American reader was expected to recognise it: plain, unsauced, and built on the quality of the meat.