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Mutton Chops, Sauce Fermiere
Neatly trim and flatten six tender mutton chops. Season all over with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, add the chops, one beside another, and fry rather slowly for six minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish, one overlapping another, crown-like, pour a hot Fermiere sauce over them and serve.
A short, straightforward pan-fry whose only real difficulty is the sauce it depends on and the meat it calls for. Both need a word.
- Sauce Fermière is not included hereSauce Fermiere is not included here -- The recipe assumes you already have a hot "Fermiere" sauce from elsewhere in the book. In period French practice fermiere is a farmhouse-style garnish of carrot, turnip, celery and onion cut small and sweated in butter, usually moistened with a brown or velute base; some versions add a little ham. Make or choose that first, since the chops take twelve minutes total.
- Finding muttonMutton is mature sheep, generally reckoned at over a year and often over two, with a stronger, fattier flavour than lamb. It is hard to find at most butchers now; if you order true mutton it is worth asking for loin or rib chops cut a good inch thick, as thin mutton chops dry out badly.
- "Flatten" means moderatelyA light pounding to even the thickness, not a cutlet. Bone-in chops should be flattened only in the meaty part or the bone will loosen.
- Six minutes a side, checkedThat timing suits a chop around three-quarters of an inch thick over medium heat and will take it to medium-well or beyond. For a thick lamb chop it is too long; pull it at 130-135F internal for pink.
- One tablespoon of butter is thin coverSix chops in a single layer will want more fat, or a wide pan and two batches. Crowding steams the meat and you lose the browning the dish is built on. Butter alone scorches at frying heat, so add a little neutral oil with it.
- Rest before dressingLet the chops sit three or four minutes off the heat before arranging them, then overlap them crown-like on a hot platter as the recipe directs.
- YieldSix chops serve three as a main course, or six as one course of a longer meal.
"Fermiere" is French for the farmer's wife, and in nineteenth-century kitchen French it labelled a garnish of root vegetables cut small and stewed in butter -- the cook's shorthand for rustic ingredients handled with restaurant precision. Books of this era are organised around that grammar of sauces and garnishes: the same trimmed chops become a la fermiere, chasseur, or Robert depending only on what is poured over them, so a recipe can be four lines long and still be complete to a reader who owns the rest of the volume. The mutton itself dates the page as much as the sauce does. Sheep were commonly kept for wool before slaughter, and mature mutton was ordinary butcher's meat through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth; changes in the wool and sheep trades and a growing taste for milder meat pushed it out of English-speaking markets, and what is sold now is overwhelmingly lamb.