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Glaced Chops
Boil carefully a well-trimmed rack of mutton. When cold cut the chops apart and trim all the rough pieces off bones. Put one tablespoonful of gelatine in two tablespoonfuls cold water to soak. Put one tablespoonful butter, one of flour in a sauce pan to melt; add half pint of milk; stir until boiling; add the gelatine and half teaspoonful of salt, half teaspoonful of onion juice, and half saltspoon of white pepper. When this is cool, cover each chop carefully and stand it aside to harden. Serve around a bed of fringed celery with mayonnaise.
This is a chaud-froid in miniature: cooked chops masked in a white sauce set with gelatine, meant for a cold buffet table. Everything depends on catching the sauce at the right moment of cooling.
- The hinge: coat at the right temperatureThe sauce must be cool enough to cling but still fluid — the point at which it coats a spoon and holds a line drawn with a finger. Too warm and it slides off the chop, too cool and it sets into lumps. Set the pan in a bowl of iced water and stir as it comes down, and if it sets too far, rewarm gently and start again.
- MuttonMutton means sheep over two years old, strong-flavoured and rare in American markets now. A rack of lamb is the practical substitute; it cooks faster and tastes milder, which suits a mayonnaise-and-celery presentation.
- "Boil carefully"Read this as a gentle poach in salted water or stock at a bare tremble, around 180F, not a rolling boil, which would toughen the meat and cloud it. Cool the rack in its liquid, then chill thoroughly before cutting the chops apart — cold meat cuts clean and takes the coating better.
- MeasuresHalf a pint of milk is one cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is an eighth. One tablespoon of powdered gelatine is rather more than a standard envelope (an envelope is about 1/4 oz or 7 grams, some 2 1/4 teaspoons), so this is a firm set for a cup of sauce — appropriate here, since the coating has to stand up unrefrigerated on a serving dish.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze it in a piece of cheesecloth. Half a teaspoon takes about a quarter of a medium onion.
- Chilling, not standing"Stand it aside to harden" meant a cold larder. Set the coated chops on a rack over a tray in the refrigerator; the sauce firms in 30 to 45 minutes. A second thin coat over the first gives the smooth opaque finish these dishes were prized for.
- Fringed celeryCut celery stalks into three-inch lengths, slice each end repeatedly lengthwise almost to the middle, and drop them into ice water for an hour. The cut strips curl back into a fringe.
- YieldA rack gives seven or eight chops, enough for four as a cold luncheon course. The sauce quantity here is about right for that number.
The technique is chaud-froid — literally "hot-cold" — a classic of French garde-manger in which a cooked item is masked in a sauce enriched with gelatine or reduced aspic and served cold. Nineteenth-century professional kitchens used it for poultry, game and cutlets on the cold buffet, and at some point in the closing decades of the century it appears to have filtered into American household manuals in simplified form, the elaborate aspic base replaced by a béchamel with a spoonful of packaged gelatine stirred in. That substitution is the whole story of the period: packaged gelatine put moulded and glazed cold dishes within reach of a cook without a stockpot of reduced veal bones. Mutton on a luncheon table was unremarkable then in a way it is not now, and the chops were meant as cold food eaten standing up, at a reception or a summer supper, arranged to look composed rather than served hot from the range.