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Plain Broiled Lamb Chops
Trim and lightly flatten six French lamb chops. Season all around with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Arrange on a broiler and broil for four minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish, decorate with a little watercress and serve.
A four-line recipe that assumes a cook standing over live coals with a hinged gridiron. The only real decisions are chop thickness and heat.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of white pepper — a fair amount, matched to the half teaspoon of salt. White pepper was the standard choice for pale meats and sauces where black specks were thought unsightly.
- "French" chopsThese are rib chops with the fat and meat scraped from the last inch of bone so the bone shows clean. Any butcher will french them on request; a loin chop works but has a different shape and cooks slightly slower.
- The broiler is the fireIn period practice "arrange on a broiler" meant a wire double gridiron set over coals or under a gas salamander, with the meat close to fierce direct heat. A modern overhead broiler on high, rack set 3–4 inches from the element, is the nearest equivalent; a ripping-hot cast-iron grill pan is closer still to the original char.
- Four minutes a sideThat timing suits a chop about three quarters of an inch thick and gives medium-rare to medium. Today's rib chops are often cut an inch and a half or more, which needs five to six minutes a side, or a sear followed by a few minutes in a 400F oven. Lamb is properly served pink; 130–135F internal.
- Lightly flattenA single press with the flat of a cleaver evens the thickness so the whole chop cooks at one rate. Do not pound it thin — rib chops have little connective tissue and nothing to gain from being tenderised.
- Dry surface, no oil in the recipeNo fat is added because the chops carry their own and the fire is doing the work. Pat the meat dry and salt it just before cooking so the surface browns rather than steams.
- Hot dishThe instruction to dress on a hot dish is not decorative. Lamb fat congeals unpleasantly on a cool plate, which is presumably why the method specifies a warmed platter.
- YieldSix french chops is two to three servings as a main course, three chops to a hearty portion. The watercress may well have been eaten rather than merely looked at — its pepperiness cuts the fat.
Plain broiling is among the oldest cooking methods, and one that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery writers liked to present as a test of a cook: nothing to hide behind but heat and timing. Recipes of this kind belong to the chop-house and hotel tradition that Filippini and his contemporaries came out of, where a grill cook worked a bank of coals and turned out chops, steaks and cutlets to order, often finished with a token of green — watercress, a little parsley — serving as garnish and palate cleanser. The frenched bone belongs to the same world: a clean bone gives the diner something to take hold of, and gives the waiter somewhere to slip a paper frill. White pepper turns up often in such recipes, consistent with a preference for seasoning that leaves no visible trace.