Home › Meats › Mutton and Lamb Chops
Mutton and Lamb Chops
Broil mutton or lamb chops on a gridiron over a bright fire. Put salt and pepper upon each chop and hot butter, and serve very hot. Trim off the superfluous fat and skin, so as to give the chops a certain daintiness of shape.
A two-line instruction that assumes a coal or wood fire and a cook who already knows what a chop should look like. The technique transfers to a broiler or a heavy pan with almost no adjustment.
- The hinge: a genuinely hot surface"A bright fire" means the coals have burned down past flame to steady red heat, hot enough that the chop sears immediately. A gas broiler on high with the rack 3-4 inches from the element, or a cast-iron grill pan preheated until a drop of water skitters, gives the equivalent. A lukewarm surface stews the meat and renders out the fat without browning it.
- Cut and thicknessRib and loin chops cut about 1 to 1 1/4 inches thick are what this suits. Thinner supermarket chops overcook before they colour; if that is what you have, sear hard and pull them off fast.
- TimingThe original gives none. For a 1-inch loin chop, roughly 3-4 minutes a side for medium-rare, 125-130F at the centre, rising a few degrees off the heat. Lamb is customarily served pink; older mutton benefits from being taken slightly further, to about 135-140F.
- TrimmingThe instruction to trim fat and skin is partly cosmetic and partly practical: dripping fat flares on an open fire. Leave a thin cap of fat for flavour and score it so it does not curl the chop as it contracts.
- Season before, not afterThe text seasons the chops after they come off the fire. Salting immediately before cooking, or 30-40 minutes ahead, is generally held to give better browning and more even seasoning than salt scattered over a cooked surface.
- The hot butterThis is the finishing step, not a cooking fat. Melt butter until it foams and is just beginning to smell nutty, then spoon it over the chops as they go out. Parsley butter and anchovy butter were both used with chops in this period.
- Serve very hotMutton and lamb fat has a higher melting point than beef fat, so it sets and turns waxy sooner as a plate cools, which is why the original insists on heat. Warm the plates.
- YieldTwo chops per person for rib chops, one for a thick loin or shoulder chop. Rest them three or four minutes before serving.
Mutton and lamb were quite different meats to a nineteenth-century cook: mutton came from an adult sheep, was darker, stronger and cheaper, and dominated British tables well into the twentieth century, while lamb was the young, mild, more expensive option. American mutton consumption collapsed over the following decades, and the word has largely vanished from butchers' counters here, which is why a book that treats the two as interchangeable now reads as a period document. The gridiron this recipe assumes was a standard piece of hearth equipment, a set of iron bars on short legs set over coals, and broiling on one was the expected treatment for a chop. The emphasis on trimming for "daintiness of shape" belongs to the same sensibility as the French-trimmed chop: chops were meant to arrive looking composed, not merely cooked.