In summer, the suburbs smell like chops.
Ladies were respectfully requested to remove their hats so that those down the back could see.
Up the front, at Auckland’s Federal Hall and Wellington’s Town Hall Concert Chamber and many more crowded rooms across the country, Miss Margaret Lovell demonstrated the wonders of gas cookery.
It took her just 15 minutes to produce a “lightning lunch”: Cheese toast, apple fritters, chip potatoes, fried fish - and grilled chops.
Once, all lunches led to chops.
1914, King’s Luncheon Rooms, Auckland: “Cleanliness, our motto. Today’s menu ... fricassee tripe and onions. Lamb chops and green peas.”
1929, Barrett’s Hotel, Wellington: “Now run under the Continental system. Specimen luncheon menu ... mutton chops”
1965, Beath’s, Christchurch: “Tops in Chops. Tenderest, Tastiest, Temptingest of them all. Real baby lamb chops, grilled to an appetising golden brown, served with green peas and O’Brien potatoes.”
Chops are nothing fancier than a chunk of meat on a bit of vertebrae. For generations, New Zealanders literally lived off the sheep’s (and sometimes the pig’s) back. In this country, the chop was ubiquitous.
Consider the All Blacks. It’s 1922 and, a year earlier, on the occasion of a match against the Springboks, they’d stayed at Wellington’s Bay View boarding house. Now, their union was in the Supreme Court arguing a claim for damages from a landlady who wanted payment beyond the ordinary tariff for these rugby players who, every breakfast, devoured at least two chops and four eggs each.
Consider Peter Snell. It’s 1964 and the middle-distance runner is at the Tokyo Olympics. Instead of heading back to the athlete’s village, he goes for dinner at the New Zealand Trade Commissioner’s residence. Later, he describes it as “a pleasant evening in easy surroundings” with a meal that included “something badly missed in the village - prime New Zealand lamb chops.” The next day, Snell wins gold in the 1500m.
But now, consider the modern restaurant menu. When was the last time you dined out on a chop? A proper chop with bones and fat, muscle and meat? In the early 1980s, Cobb & Co’s main meal section included ham steak and pineapple ($4.75), crumbed scallops ($6.25) and grilled lamb chops ($4.50). At Wellington’s Green Parrot restaurant you can still order lamb chops ($38) but, for the most part, the previously omnipresent cut is gone, replaced by something smaller-neater-tidier.
Chops, chops ... cutlets.
MacLean Fraser has cooked around the world. His restaurant credits include Wellington’s Hippopotamus, Dockside and, most recently, a nine-year stint as executive chef at the Bolton Hotel. Today, he’s a Beef + Lamb ambassador and account manager for Alliance Group’s premium meat brands. Think Lumina lamb, Silere alpine origin merino and 55-day aged handpicked beef – and not a single chop between them.
“The closest we get, I guess are racks. I love chops, but it’s not something you really see in a premium space. I think they’ve very much gone out of fashion. When I was at Hippopotamus, we had pork and lamb chops on the menu, but they were really ‘cutlets’, from the rack. And I’ve used a venison cutlet at the Bolton ...”
(In case you were wondering, cows do contain chops. Fraser confirms a beef T-bone steak is essentially the same piece of meat as a lamb loin chop, “but I guess it just got better marketing”).
Restaurants offer a respite from the monotony of home cooking. The cutlery matches, the plates are nice, and someone else will be washing the pans afterwards. In that environment, why would you order something you more usually eat in front of Shortland Street? Those lamb cutlets that Fraser used to cook were served with crumbed and deep-fried “brain popcorn”, an offal-and-chop dinner that was almost certainly not on any domestic midweek meal plan.
Cutlets are for restaurants, loin chops are for at home and shoulder chops are the homeliest of them all. Neck chops? Spare a squeamish thought for the domestic goddess, circa 1952, when the Edmonds Cookery Book instructed cooks to take a two-pound portion of sheep’s neck “and cut into chops”.
Fraser: “Outside of lamb racks or cutlets, all of my chop cooking over the last 20 years as a chef has been at home. My kids love them and I love them. I love throwing them on the barbecue. But they’re not something we use in a restaurant or even a cut that we tend to have available to us in a restaurant.”
Partly, he says, that’s driven by changing customer tastes (bog-standard loin and shoulder chops have fat and bones) but it’s also about meat producers looking for a “value-add” from the carcass. You could turn a lamb into chops, or you could produce fillets, tenderloins, saddles, supremes, oysters and other cuts that command more cash.
“There’s more value for the farmer to have those extended cuts,” says Fraser. “More labour goes into them, but there’s more money to be made and those cuts are more versatile for chefs ... if I’m looking at a dish that is going to look nice on your plate, chops are ... rustic. Unless you take something like your French lamb rack and make it into cutlets.
“I love throwing a mint-marinated lamb shoulder chop on the barbecue. Cook it hard, at a big, high temperature and get some nice crispy bits around the outside. It’s a bit smoky, a bit burnt. Happy days. You get stuck into it, that bit of fat renders out and the kids love chewing between the bones. But if you’re on your first date in a fine-dining restaurant? You don’t want to be paying $45 and having a big mess like that.”
Why did restaurants give chops the chop? “I would say it’s because we’re a bunch of bloody snobs,” says chef Croydon Cole.
He remembers cooking loin chops “half my life ago” at HQ restaurant in Auckland’s Westhaven. Now, he confirms, it’s all about the lamb rack and the cut-down cutlet. But in his opinion?
“I’m bringing back the chop! Even if it’s just for me.”
Cole is on the line from Thailand, on a motorcycle odyssey of Southeast Asia, but he’ll be back at his restaurant Smokin Cole BBQ next month - with plans to add a piece of shoulder chop-friendly outdoor grill kit to his kitchen.
“You go to the old Mad Butcher and buy a bag of frozen ones. That was us, as teenagers in the 80s. Me and the boys. We were all very independent, we all came from broken homes, so we all cooked to some degree.
“We’d get boxes of these shoulder chops. I distinctly remember the very first time, eating them on our very first holiday alone, allowed to leave the house unsupervised, and we ended up in Pauanui and the police promptly told us we all had to leave ...
“Obviously that got our backs up. So we were like, ‘Righto, let’s pull out the barbecues!’ We slept at the lifeguard tower and had barbecues going on the beach and all these beautiful lamb shoulder chops.”
Cole’s resume includes 15 years’ cheffing on superyachts and a fine-dining stint at Euro. Today, he specialises in low-and-slow American-barbecue menus.
“I love all foods, but I am a carnivore. I love veges and I love seafood, but it just doesn’t fill me up. I love the taste of meat and especially charred meat. Mostly, I like it medium to medium-rare. But a lamb shoulder chop? I will cook that thing until it’s crisp and just drown it in salt.”
Mid-summer and the sun is sinking. The air feels fat. Warm and gold. They call it the “magic hour”, that moment when the world glows like an old polaroid photo. In the suburbs, you grab something cold from the fridge. Outside, it smells like chops. Or at least it used to.
Stats NZ has just revealed the largest annual increase in food prices in 32 years. In 2022, the cost of fruit and vegetables increased 23 per cent and meat went up 11 per cent. At the supermarket counter last week, that translated to almost $30 a kilo for lamb loin chops and $16-$21 for the pork equivalent. Lamb shoulder chops were cheaper (on special for $14-$16) but the butchers Canvas spoke to agreed: rising prices have become a significant consideration for customers.
“I guess all food is bloody expensive these days,” says Shawn Nicholas, from Te Awamutu’s Expleo Butchery.
The former dairy farmer opened the family-run deli and meat shop about five years ago. Nicholas is currently working on a vegetarian sausage in a seaweed casing, but one of his more recent experimental successes was a double lamb loin chop (imagine two T-bones, joined at the head of the “T”), for local restaurant Fahrenheit.
“I’d seen it somewhere, and I was just playing around with things and thought ‘that’d be pretty cool.’”
Nicholas says it’s a constant challenge to create a point of difference for a generation of shoppers who haven’t necessarily grown up with chops.
“They’re a kind of traditional thing, but we probably don’t see the 18-26-year-old bracket of customers buying them, and that’s probably to do with the way they were brought up. For a period there, the local butcheries were disappearing. They’re starting to come back now, and people are more aware of how their food is presented. People are time-poor. If we can create something that’s quick and easy to cook, and make it look sexy ... "
Butchery chops, says Nicholas, tend to be thicker than their supermarket cousins. But, at both ends of the retail spectrum, the shoulder chop will almost certainly be the cheapest. How is the humblest cut faring on the homefront?
“I reckon that over the years, the chop has changed a lot,” says Brad Gillespie, 2022′s Young Butcher of the Year and butchery head at Rototuna New World.
“My nan used to buy shoulder chops for casseroles and make a nice winter stew. Nowadays, we don’t sell as many during winter ... and the cooking knowledge just isn’t there.”
Kitchen literacy has become such a concern for the pork industry that it has created an education campaign aimed at teaching customers how to perfect the pork chop. The “6+2+2″ method translates to a six-minute cook on one side, two minutes on the other and two minutes of resting time. (This method is not recommended for Hudson & Halls’ triple-stacked pork chop with apricots - 1977 was a different country when three chops were always better than one.)
Today, Gillespie estimates about 40 per cent of the meat sold across his counter is chops, butchered only by someone with sign-off to use the bandsaw (”It’s a pretty unforgiving”), with the average lamb yielding 12-14 loin chops and up to 20 from the shoulder.
“We sell quite a lot, but people don’t have them every night. They’re going for leg steaks and leaner cuts – cutlets and racks - rather than getting a chop.”
For Gillespie, the appeal of the chop is enduring and simple: “Eating it with your hands and getting into it. That’s what I like. Just grabbing the bones and having a good old feed. I don’t think I’d use my knife and fork to eat chops!”
RECIPE: STICKY-GLAZED LAMB LOIN CHOPS WITH SALAD
(Recipe from Kathy Paterson, recipes.co.nz)
Ingredients
8 lamb loin chops
3 Tbsp hoisin sauce
2 Tbsp honey
2 Tbsp soy sauce
1/2 Tbsp sherry
1/2 tsp Chinese five-spice
For the salad:
350g green beans, steamed until tender and cooled
4-6 radishes, sliced
1 red capsicum, finely sliced
2 spring onions, finely sliced
A handful of parsley, chopped
A bunch of chives, chopped
For the dressing:
Juice of 1 lemon
1 tsp Dijon mustard
4 Tbsp olive oil
METHOD
Place the lamb marinade ingredients in a bowl and stir to combine.
Brush lamb chops with marinade and set aside.
Preheat the barbecue plate until medium-hot.
Combine all salad ingredients in a large bowl.
Place all the dressing ingredients in a screw-top jar, season with salt and freshly ground pepper and shake to combine.
Place a piece of baking paper or silicone baking sheet on the barbecue (this helps prevent the marinade from just burning).
Place on the lamb chops and barbecue for 10-12 minutes, turning once.
Drizzle dressing over salad and toss to combine. Serve with the lamb chops.
LAMB CHOPS WITH SALSA VERDE & LEMON RICE
(Recipe from Allyson Gofton, recipes.co.nz)
Ingredients
8 lamb loin chops
1.5 cups Basmati rice
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 red onion finely chopped
2 garlic cloves chopped
Juice and grated zest of 1 lemon
2 sprigs fresh rosemary roughly chopped
2.5 cups chicken stock
For the salsa verde:
1 garlic clove
3 anchovy fillets
3 gherkins
1 tsp capers
2 large handfuls of parsley
Juice of 1 lemon
METHOD
Put the rice in a bowl and cover with water. Set aside.
Heat 1 Tbsp oil in a heavy-based saucepan and sauté the onion and garlic for a few minutes until softened.
Drain the rice, add to the pan along with the lemon zest and rosemary and stir together well.
Pour in the stock, bring to a very gentle simmer, cover and cook on the lowest heat for 10-12 minutes, until all the liquid is absorbed.
Turn the heat off and leave covered, while you cook the lamb.
Season the chops well with salt and pepper and grill for 3-4 minutes each side or until cooked to your liking.
Cover with foil and leave to rest for 2-3 minutes.
Meanwhile, blitz all the salsa verde ingredients in a food processor, or chop the ingredients into small dice and use a pestle and mortar to grind together.
Taste and add a touch more lemon juice if desired. Season and set aside.
Season the rice, separate the grains with a fork and serve with the chops.
Spoon over the salsa and enjoy with a salad.
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