Home › Meats and Entrees › Baked Mutton Chops
Baked Mutton Chops
(Italy.) Braise 6 chops in stock with 2 carrots, an onion, parsley, thyme, and sweet marjoram. Let them brown, drain them, and reduce the sauce. Add to it 1/2 cup bread-crumbs, yolk of 1 hard-boiled egg, 6 mushrooms, salt, and pepper. Chop this fine and dip each chop in it, then in grated Parmesan cheese. Bake in the oven until brown and serve with Tartare sauce.
MUTTON CHOPS (as cooked in Southern France.) Trim and season 5 cutlets; fry them in 1 ounce butter. Chop 5 small onions and fry them in butter; when soft but not brown, add the juice of a lemon, some parsley, and the yolks of 2 eggs. Stir until thick and add salt and pepper. Cover the chops on both sides with this, and lay them on a dish; dust bread-crumbs thickly over all and bake until brown. Serve with green peas.
Two versions of the same idea: a chop cooked first, then jacketed in a savoury paste and browned in the oven. The paste is where both stand or fall.
- Mutton, and what to buy insteadMutton means sheep older than a year, often two or more, with a stronger flavour and firmer texture; it is now uncommon in ordinary American and British shops, though specialist and halal butchers still carry it. Lamb rib or loin chops, or shoulder chops for the braised version, behave much the same way, though they need noticeably less cooking than mutton did.
- "Cutlets" in the second recipeIn this period a mutton cutlet is a rib chop with the bone shortened and scraped, not a boneless slice. Ask for a rack cut into single ribs, or use loin chops and accept a slightly thicker piece.
- Oven heatNeither recipe gives a temperature. "Bake until brown" on an already-cooked chop wants a hot oven, 425F, for roughly 10 to 15 minutes, or the coating dries out before it colours. A broiler pass at the end is faster if the crust is stubborn.
- Keep the egg-and-lemon sauce off the boilIn the Southern France version the two raw yolks are what thicken the onion, lemon and parsley mixture. Stir it over low heat, or off the heat entirely, until it is thick enough to hold on a spoon; a simmer will scramble it and it will not coat the chops.
- Reducing the braising liquidThe Italian version depends on the reduced stock being thick and glossy before the crumbs go in. Strain out the carrot, onion and herbs first, reduce hard until it is a syrupy few tablespoons, then work in the crumbs, the hard-boiled yolk and the chopped mushrooms to make a spreadable paste rather than a wet stuffing.
- Mushrooms and crumbsSix mushrooms would have meant small cultivated buttons, a few ounces in all. Cook them off in a dry pan first so their water does not loosen the paste. The recipe does not say which crumbs; dry, fine crumbs will bind the paste better than fresh.
- Butter measureOne ounce of butter is two tablespoons.
- YieldSix chops serve three as a main course, or six as part of a longer menu of the kind this book assumes. Both accompaniments — the tartare sauce and the green peas — are served alongside.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a genre that flourished around the turn of the twentieth century: collections that gathered dishes from European kitchens and handed them to American cooks under national labels, often with the geography doing more work than the provenance. The Italian version here is recognisably in the line of breaded, Parmesan-dusted cutlets, though the braise-then-coat method and the tartare sauce look more like Anglo-American restaurant practice than anything Italian. What both recipes share is a thoroughly period logic: meat was cooked once to make it tender, then re-dressed and browned a second time so it could arrive at table looking like a made dish rather than a plain chop. Mutton itself is the other marker of date. It was ordinary butcher's meat throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, valued for flavour and cheapness, and its near-disappearance from English-speaking markets is generally traced to the period after the Second World War, which is a large part of why recipes like these read as unfamiliar now.