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French Mutton Chops with Bacon
Neatly trim and lightly flatten six tender, French mutton chops. Mix on a plate one teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and a tablespoon of oil; gently roll the chops in the seasoning, arrange them on a broiler, and broil on a brisk fire for six minutes on each side. Remove, place on a hot dish, one overlapping another. Arrange six thin slices of bacon on top of the chops and serve.
Cut out and arrange six very thin slices of bacon, broil them for two minutes on each side, remove and serve.
A plain broiled chop, written for a coal or wood grill and for mutton rather than lamb. Two things need translating: the meat and the fire.
- "French" chopsThis means the rib chop with the bone scraped clean of meat and fat for the last inch or so — what a butcher today calls a frenched rack chop. It is a knife technique, not a French recipe; ask for a frenched rack and cut between the bones.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is sheep over a year old, usually well over two: darker, firmer, stronger in flavour, and rare outside halal and specialist butchers. Lamb rib chops substitute directly but are smaller, more tender and considerably milder.
- Six minutes a side is for muttonThat timing suits a mutton chop over a brisk coal fire. A lamb rib chop an inch thick under a modern broiler set to high, about 4 inches from the element, wants roughly 3 to 4 minutes a side for medium rare. Judge by an internal temperature of 130-135F rather than the clock.
- "Brisk fire"Full heat, no compromise. Preheat the broiler ten minutes and the pan with it, so the chops start searing on contact instead of steaming.
- The seasoningA tablespoon of oil for six chops is barely a film — the point is to help the salt and pepper adhere and to keep the meat from sticking, not to marinate. White pepper was often preferred in this style of cooking so as not to speck the meat; black pepper will do, though its flavour is not quite the same.
- The bacon, twiceThe last two sentences repeat the same instruction, the second supplying the broiling the first omits. Broil six thin rashers for about two minutes a side and lay them over the chops.
- Resting and the hot dishOverlapping the chops on a heated platter keeps them warm. The recipe says nothing about resting the meat; a few minutes' rest before serving is a modern addition.
- YieldSix rib chops feeds two or three as a main course, or six as a first course or part of a larger meal.
Mutton chops with bacon belongs to the Anglo-French grill repertoire common in hotel and club cooking on both sides of the Atlantic before the First World War — the same family as the mixed grill and the chop-house cutlet. The "French" in the title refers to the butchery, the trimmed and scraped rib bone that let a diner pick the chop up cleanly, a presentation usually associated with nineteenth-century French professional practice and taken up by English and American kitchens. Mutton was then the ordinary sheep meat of the market, lamb the more expensive spring meat; the balance flipped over the twentieth century, and in most of the United States mutton has effectively disappeared from retail. The bacon is doing a job beyond flavour: the rendered fat from the rashers laid on top dresses the chops in place of a sauce.