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Lamb Chops, Versailles
Neatly trim and lightly flatten six nice, tender lamb chops. Mix on a plate a tablespoon oil with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper; repeatedly roll the chops in the seasoning and keep on the plate. Peel and wash six heads large fresh mushrooms and place in a frying pan with a tablespoon butter. Season with two saltspoons salt, one saltspoon white pepper, gently fry for five minutes on each side and keep hot. Arrange six thin slices broiled ham on a hot dish, place the chops on broiler, and broil for four minutes on each side. Remove and lay the chops over the slices of ham, arrange the mushrooms over chops, the whole crown-like, one overlapping another; and half an ounce butter to the mushrooms pan, thoroughly heat, squeeze the juice of a half lemon into the butter, adding a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, lightly mix, pour over the chops and serve.
A straightforward composed chop dish that depends almost entirely on timing and on getting everything hot at the same moment. Have the ham, mushrooms and serving dish ready before the chops go near the heat.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the chop seasoning takes about half a teaspoon white pepper, and the mushrooms half a teaspoon salt with a quarter teaspoon pepper.
- The hinge: assemble hotNothing here is cooked after assembly, so cold plates or a cooling pan of ham will sink the dish. Warm the serving dish, hold the mushrooms covered off the heat, and build the crown the moment the chops leave the broiler.
- Mushroom heads"Six heads large fresh mushrooms" is generally read as six large caps; the recipe itself says nothing about the stems. Peeling was routine in cookbooks of the period; cultivated mushrooms today need only a wipe.
- Broiling timeFour minutes a side under a preheated broiler suits a chop about three-quarters of an inch thick, taken to medium. Thicker loin or rib chops of an inch and a half want six to seven minutes a side, or a finish in a 400F oven.
- The hamThin slices of cooked ham, broiled or pan-crisped briefly just to heat through; they are a base, not a second meat course, and long cooking turns them leathery.
- The pan sauceHalf an ounce of butter is one tablespoon. The recipe has you add it to the mushroom pan and heat it through before squeezing in the lemon and stirring in the parsley. It is a butter sauce, not a reduction; make it in under a minute.
- Oil for the chopsA tablespoon of oil for six chops is a coating, not a marinade — enough to carry the salt and pepper and keep the surface from drying under the broiler. Use a neutral oil or light olive oil.
- YieldSix as written, one chop each, which reads as a course in a longer meal. For a main course allow two chops per person and scale the ham and mushrooms with them.
The name is a restaurant convention rather than a historical dish: by the late nineteenth century French kitchens had a large repertoire of garnish names attached to places, châteaux and public figures, and "Versailles" signalled a dressed, courtly presentation rather than any documented recipe of the palace. Its logic is pure grand-hotel plating — a base of ham, a crown of chops overlapped in a ring, a cap of mushrooms and a lemon-butter sauce. Filippini's International Cook Book, drawing on his years at Delmonico's in New York, is full of such constructions, and their appeal to the American home cook of 1906 was precisely that they made a modest amount of meat look like an occasion. The mushroom caps are worth noting: the recipe simply assumes six large fresh heads are to be had.