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Lamb Chops, Julienne
Neatly trim and flatten six fresh, good-sized lamb chops, lightly shorten end bones, season all over with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, and keep on a plate till required.
Cut in fine, one-inch-long julienne strips a very small carrot, small white onion, two branches celery, one ounce cooked, smoked beef tongue, one ounce cooked ham and six peeled, fresh, good-sized mushrooms. Place these articles in a small saucepan with one ounce butter, half light teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, pour in half gill claret, let reduce on brisk fire till nearly dry. Pour in one gill tomato sauce with the leaves of a branch chervil, lightly mix, cover pan and set in oven for thirty minutes, remove and keep hot.
Heat one tablespoon melted butter in frying pan, lay in chops one beside another and briskly cook for four minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish, one overlapping another crown-like, pour contents of saucepan in centre, adjust a paper frill at end of each bone and serve.
A straightforward pan-fried chop with a braised vegetable garnish; the only real work is the knife work. Everything in the saucepan can be built an hour ahead and reheated while the chops cook.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of claret is 1/4 cup and a gill of tomato sauce is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making "two saltspoons white pepper" a half teaspoon.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. The pan is covered and the garnish is only stewing down, so precision matters little; a moderate oven, around 350F, will do.
- ClaretClaret meant red Bordeaux. Any dry, unoaked red works. Reduce it "nearly dry" before the tomato sauce goes in, or the finished garnish tastes thin and sharp.
- Julienne means julienneStrips one inch long and about 1/8 inch square, cut uniformly. The garnish is meant to read as a bundle of matchsticks in sauce, and unevenly cut vegetables will cook to mush around the harder pieces.
- Tongue and hamAn ounce each of cooked smoked tongue and cooked ham is seasoning, not substance. Smoked tongue is a deli-counter item at best now; a further ounce of good ham, or a little speck, covers the same ground.
- Tomato sauceIn this book that means a cooked, sieved sauce of the classic French kind, not a jarred pasta sauce. Passata simmered a few minutes with a knob of butter is closer to the intent.
- ChervilDelicate and quick to fade. If you cannot find it, use a mix of parsley and a pinch of tarragon, and add it at the end rather than at the start of the 30-minute braise.
- Four minutes a sideThat suits a chop about 3/4 inch thick, cooked to pink. Thicker loin chops need a rest of five minutes off the heat; thin rib chops will be past medium in that time. Judge by feel or pull at 130-135F internal for medium-rare.
- Yield and presentationSix chops serve three as a main course. The crown arrangement with the garnish heaped in the centre is the whole point of the dish; the paper frills are optional theatre and require frenched bones.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) reads as a working chef's file translated for domestic use: French technique, French vocabulary, portions for six. "Julienne" is a French kitchen term for a fine matchstick cut, recorded in cookery writing well before the nineteenth century and usually attached first to soups garnished that way; by Filippini's day it named the cut itself and any dish dressed with it. The garnish here is a small ragoût in the classical mould, where a little cured tongue and ham do the work of seasoning rather than bulking the plate, and the crown of chops with paper frills at each bone is pure hotel dining-room presentation of the period, when service was à la russe and the platter reached the table intact.