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Lamb Chops, Maitre D'Hotel
Neatly trim and flatten six nice French lamb chops, season with a teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon pepper. Arrange on broiler and broil for four minutes on each side, remove, dress on a hot dish, spread a maitre d'hotel butter over them and serve.
A two-line broiling recipe that assumes you already know how to make maitre d'hotel butter. Everything depends on the thickness of the chops and on having the compound butter ready and cold before the meat goes under the heat.
- The butter is the recipeMaitre d'hotel butter is softened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper — roughly 4 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp parsley and 2 tsp lemon juice for six chops. Roll it in paper, chill it firm, and cut coins to lay on the hot meat so it melts at the table rather than turning to oil on the plate.
- "French" chopsRib chops with the bone scraped clean of meat and fat for an inch or two — what a butcher now calls frenched. Ask for rack chops cut about an inch thick; loin chops work but will not have the bare bone.
- FlatteningA light press with the flat of a cleaver or a heavy pan to even the thickness, not a pounding. Over-flattened chops overcook before they colour.
- Broil, not bakeAt the time this meant a gridiron over live coals or a gas broiler with the meat close to the flame. Use the top rack of a modern broiler, preheated fully, with the chops two to three inches from the element.
- Four minutes a sideRight for a one-inch chop taken to medium-rare, about 130F at the centre. Thicker chops need six to seven minutes a side; thinner ones will be past pink at four. Judge by an instant-read thermometer rather than the clock.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper across six chops is generous but not excessive, since much of it stays on the surface. Season several minutes ahead so the salt is not sitting dry on the meat when it meets the heat.
- The hot dishWarm the serving platter — lamb fat congeals fast, and a cold plate undoes the broiling. Let the chops sit two or three minutes under the melting butter before serving.
- YieldSix frenched rib chops serve two or three as a main course, or six as part of a longer menu of the kind this book assumes.
Maitre d'hotel butter — literally the steward's or head-of-house butter — is the plainest of the classical French compound butters, and by the late nineteenth century it had become the default finish for anything grilled: steaks, chops, sole, plain boiled potatoes. Its usefulness in a hotel kitchen is obvious: a batch could be made in the morning, chilled, and sliced to order, turning a bare broiled chop into a dressed dish in seconds. Filippini's book takes it as common knowledge, which is why the instruction here is simply to spread it over and serve. The recipe also shows the period's confidence about lamb: four minutes a side leaves the meat pink.