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Lamb Chops (Madame de Maintenon Trim)
(Madame de Maintenon.) Trim the chops, make a forcemeat of chopped ham, bread-crumbs, and mushrooms, in equal parts, mixed with onion juice, parsley, butter, and seasoning. Put a tablespoonful on each chop; roll it in buttered paper. Bake, in a closed tin, in a hot oven, then mark them with a hot skewer, to imitate the wires of a gridiron. Serve in the papers with peas. This dish was invented to please the king whom the lady married.
A Victorian rendering of côtelettes en papillote à la Maintenon: chops sealed in paper with a savoury paste, baked, and served in their wrappers. The method is sound, but the original assumes a cook who already knows the proportions and the timing.
- Cook the mushrooms firstRaw mushrooms are mostly water, and inside a sealed paper they steam the chop instead of letting the forcemeat set. Chop them fine and cook them in butter until the pan is dry before mixing with the ham and crumbs — this is the difference between a paste and a puddle.
- "A hot oven"The book gives no numbers; a hot oven in this period is usually rendered as roughly 400-450F. The paper protects the meat, so the heat needs to be brisk enough to cook the chop through in fifteen to twenty minutes rather than slowly drying it.
- "A closed tin"A covered roasting tin or a baking dish with a lid, not a sealed can. The cover keeps the papers from scorching in the dry heat.
- Buttered paperThe recipe says simply to roll the chop in buttered paper; the heart or oval cut folded in overlapping pleats is the later standard papillote form and holds shut more reliably. Parchment, well buttered. Foil works but does not brown or crisp, and the point of the dish is that it comes to table in its wrapper.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve; a teaspoon is plenty for four chops. It gives the sharpness without wet pieces of onion in the forcemeat.
- SeasoningThe ham is already salty. Season with pepper and a little nutmeg or mace, taste the forcemeat raw-mixed for salt, and add none until you have.
- DonenessLoin or rib chops about an inch thick want 15–18 minutes at 425F, to an internal 130–135F for pink. Thicker chops need longer; the paper hides all visual cues, so use a thermometer through the seam.
- The hot skewerPurely decorative; it fakes grill marks on chops that were baked. Skip it unless you want the period effect, in which case heat a metal skewer on a burner and lay it briefly across the meat after baking, as the recipe directs.
- YieldThe recipe puts a tablespoonful on each chop, so roughly two tablespoons each of ham, crumbs and cooked mushrooms dresses four to six chops. Serve two per person with the peas.
Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon, was governess to Louis XIV's illegitimate children and, after the queen's death, married the king privately around 1683 — the "king whom the lady married" of the last line. Dishes à la Maintenon are traditionally credited to her kitchen, though the attribution is the sort of retrospective courtly naming that French cooks applied liberally in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and no contemporary evidence ties her personally to the recipe. What is genuinely old here is the technique: cooking meat en papillote, wrapped in oiled or buttered paper, was a standard way of holding juices and perfume around a delicate cut long before parchment was sold in rolls. The instruction to fake gridiron marks with a hot skewer is very much of its period — a grilled chop was the more prestigious thing, and a bake dressed up to look like one flattered both the cook and the table.