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Spring Lamb Chops, Sauce Perigueux
Neatly trim six nice spring lamb chops, season well all around with a half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper. Heat tablespoon butter in a frying pan, arrange in chops one beside another and fry for four minutes on each side. Pour a perigueux sauce on a hot dish, dress chops one overlapping another crown-like over same, adjust a paper frill at end of each chop and serve.
A brief restaurant-style plating recipe that assumes you already have the sauce made; the sauce is the real work and the book expects you to look it up elsewhere.
- Make the sauce firstSauce Périgueux is a demi-glace finished with chopped truffle and Madeira, and it takes far longer than the chops. Have it hot and held before the pan goes on the heat, since the chops are served immediately.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is generally reckoned at a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is about three-quarters of a teaspoon of white pepper for six chops. That is aggressive by current taste; a half teaspoon is closer to modern seasoning, with the salt as written.
- What a spring lamb chop wasSpring lamb meant a young animal of only a few months, and its rib chops would have been small and thin. Rib or loin chops sold today are often an inch or more thick, which changes the timing.
- TimingFour minutes a side implies a thin chop, perhaps half an inch, and would take it to about medium. For a modern inch-thick chop, work to an internal temperature of 130-135F for medium-rare and let it rest three or four minutes before plating.
- The panOne tablespoon of butter for six chops will brown and burn before the second side is done. Add a little neutral oil with it, or brown in oil and add butter for the last minute.
- Crown-likeThe chops are stood overlapping in a ring on the sauce, bones pointing outward, not laid flat and drowned. Pour the sauce onto the hot platter first so the browned surfaces stay dry.
- Paper frillsCutlet frills were standard service dress in hotel kitchens and are still sold for the purpose. They require the bone to be scraped clean (frenched) for an inch or so at the end.
- YieldSix small chops serve two as a main course, or three at a table with several other courses.