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Mutton Chops, Bouchere
Lightly flatten without trimming six tender mutton chops. Mix on a plate a tablespoon oil with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Repeatedly turn the chops in the seasoning, then roll in fresh bread crumbs and broil on a brisk charcoal fire five minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a dish, crown shape, adjust a curled paper at end of each chop and serve.
A butcher-style chop: no trimming, no sauce, nothing but oil, seasoning, crumbs and hard direct heat. The whole dish depends on the fire being hot enough to set the crumbs before the meat overcooks.
- The hinge: fierce, dry heatA brisk charcoal fire means coals burned down to grey ash and glowing, with the grate close over them. On a gas grill use the highest setting and preheat fully; under a domestic broiler, put the pan on the top rung. A moderate fire steams the crumbs into a pasty grey coating instead of crisping them.
- Mutton, and what to buy insteadMutton is older sheep, usually reckoned over two years, stronger in flavour and firmer than lamb, and often hard to find outside halal and specialist butchers. Lamb loin or rib chops behave the same way on the grill but cook faster; hogget, the one-to-two-year animal, is the closest match.
- "Without trimming"The instruction looks deliberate: the rim of fat is left on so it crisps and bastes the meat. The recipe does not say which cut, but if you use loin chops with a long tail, curl it round the eye of the chop and secure it with a cocktail stick.
- TimingFive minutes a side suits a chop about an inch and a quarter thick, and gives pink-centred meat. Thinner supermarket chops want three to four minutes a side. Whole-muscle mutton and lamb are conventionally served pink, around 130-135F at the centre for medium rare, though official guidance recommends 145F.
- The seasoning mixtureA tablespoon of oil for six chops is very little, and is meant only to make the crumbs adhere. Two tablespoons is more workable, and the teaspoon of salt is right for six chops seasoned on both sides.
- Bread crumbsFresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, not dried or packaged crumbs, which burn before the meat is done. Press them on firmly and grill at once; if they sit, they draw moisture from the meat and slide off on the grate.
- The paper frillsThe "curled paper" is a cutlet frill, a cut and rolled paper cuff slipped over the exposed bone end. Purely decorative. Frills are still sold for crown roasts, or a strip of parchment cut with a fringe and rolled does the job.
- YieldSix chops will serve three as a main course, or six if the chops are one course of a longer meal; the recipe itself gives no yield.
Bouchère is French for the butcher's wife, and à la bouchère is generally taken to mark a dish cooked the way a butcher would eat his own meat: a good cut, left untrimmed, seasoned plainly and put over fire, with no sauce to hide behind. The style stands in deliberate contrast to the elaborate garnished chops elsewhere in the same repertoire. Mutton chops were a fixture of English and American chophouses through the period, and the recipe here specifies a charcoal grill. The paper frill is the one flourish permitted.</p>