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March 21
Menu: Baked Shad Roe with Bacon; Broiled Lamb Chops, Mint Jelly Sauce; Cucumbers Baked Asparagus Tips; Shrimp Salad; Rice Souffle; Coffee Broiled Lamb Chops-Trim and flatten chops, sprinkle each with sherry wine, rub with salt and white pepper and broil over a clear fire until they are done, according to the tastes of those who are to eat them. Melt together 4 tablespoons Crisco, if there are 8 chops, a small tumbler mint jelly, add to it chopped parsley and a few drops of lemon juice and pour over chops just as they are to be served.
A 1913 chophouse formula with an unusual finish: mint jelly melted into fat and poured over the meat rather than served alongside. A few of its measures and assumptions need translating.
- The hinge: don't overcook the chops"Until they are done, according to the tastes of those who are to eat them" leaves doneness to the eater. Loin or rib chops are at their best pulled at 130-135F internal for medium-rare and rested five minutes; past 150F they tighten and dry, and the rich sauce cannot rescue them.
- "A clear fire"A bed of coals burned down past the smoke and flame to steady, even heat (coal or wood embers as much as charcoal). A gas grill on high or an oven broiler with the rack about four inches from the element gives much the same effect: roughly 3-4 minutes a side for a one-inch chop.
- A small tumblerA tumbler in this period was a plain drinking glass; sizes varied, but a small one probably held something in the region of 6 to 8 fluid ounces. Read it as roughly ¾ to 1 cup of mint jelly for eight chops, which is generous; half that makes a sauce rather than a glaze.
- CriscoThe book's whole reason for existing. Crisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, flavourless by design. Butter is the obvious substitute here and adds what the original deliberately left out; a neutral oil keeps the sauce closer to the author's intent.
- The sauce will separateMelted fat and fruit jelly do not emulsify on their own. Warm them gently together, whisk constantly, and take the pan off the heat as soon as the jelly liquefies. Add the parsley and lemon juice off the heat and spoon it over the chops immediately, since it splits as it cools.
- Sherry on raw meatThe sprinkle of sherry is a seasoning, not a marinade, and it flashes off over coals. If you want it to register, let the trimmed chops sit with it and the salt for 20-30 minutes at cool room temperature before they go on the fire.
- White pepperProbably chosen so no dark flecks show on pale lamb fat, though the book does not say so. Its flavour is different rather than simply milder: earthier and more fermented, without the fruity notes of black pepper.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number of servings; it scales the fat to eight chops, which would serve about four as a main course at two chops each.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook for the hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening it had introduced two years earlier, and its "Calendar of Dinners" gave a full menu for every day of the year to prove the new fat could handle anything a household cooked. Hence the dated entries: this one belongs to March 22. Mint with lamb is an English pairing of long standing, generally traced to the mint sauce of vinegar, sugar and chopped mint served with spring lamb; American tables of the period increasingly used sweet mint jelly instead, and here it is pushed a step further into a warm poured sauce. The instruction to broil "over a clear fire" is a survival from range-and-coal cookery, written at the moment when gas broilers were beginning to replace it in city kitchens.