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Mutton Chops with Peas
Neatly fry and flatten six fine, fresh, tender mutton chops, season all over with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, roll in a tablespoon oil, then broil over a brisk fire for four minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish, one overlapping another crown-like, arrange green peas in centre of chops, adjust a curled paper at end bone of chops and serve.
A plain grill dressed as a set piece: the whole recipe is the crown arrangement and the four-minute-a-side sear. Two phrases need untangling before you start.
- "Neatly fry and flatten"Almost certainly a garbled rendering of pare (trim) — the chops are trimmed of excess fat and the bone end scraped clean, then flattened with the side of a cleaver or a mallet. They are not fried at this stage; the only cooking is the broiling that follows.
- Mutton versus lambMutton means sheep over a year old, with a stronger, fattier flavour that has largely vanished from Western supermarkets. Loin or rib lamb chops are the practical substitute; if you find true mutton, expect it to want a slightly longer cook and to render more fat.
- "A brisk fire"Broiling here means direct radiant heat, over coals or under a gas broiler at full heat. Four minutes a side on chops about an inch thick gives medium-rare to medium; thicker chops need six to seven, and it is worth pulling one to check rather than trusting the clock.
- The oilA tablespoon for six chops is a film, not a marinade. It is there to keep the meat from sticking and to help the seasoning adhere — roll the chops in it after salting and go straight to the fire.
- PeasFresh shelled peas of the period were boiled in salted water until tender; frozen peas need two to three minutes and a knob of butter. Cook them last so they arrive hot, and drain them well or the dish weeps onto the platter.
- The curled paperThese are chop frills, or papillotes, cut from a folded strip of paper and slipped over the exposed bone. They are purely decorative and are optional; the crown arrangement works without them.
- AssemblyA genuinely hot platter matters more than usual, since grilled chops shed heat fast and there is no sauce to hold it. Stand them leaning against one another in a ring, bones outward, and fill the well with peas.
- YieldSix chops serves three as a main course, or six as one course of a longer meal in the style this book assumes.
Mutton chops with peas is less a specific dish than the standard grill of the nineteenth-century chophouse and hotel dining room, and it survives in books like this one because of its presentation rather than its cookery: the chops built into a ring with a vegetable in the middle is what French kitchens called serving en couronne, in a crown. The paper frill belongs to the same tradition of dressing plain meat for the dining room, and is commonly said to have been practical as well as ornamental, giving the carver or the diner something clean to grip. Mutton was the everyday roasting and grilling meat of Britain well into the twentieth century, when demand shifted decisively toward younger, milder lamb — which is why a recipe that once needed no explanation now begins with a note on where to find the meat.