Nzherald

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 ...

For Gillespie, the appeal of the chop is enduring and simple: “Eating it with your hands and getting into it. 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. Just grabbing the bones and having a good old feed. At the supermarket counter last week, that translated to almost $30 a kilo for lamb loin chops and $16-$21 for the pork equivalent. “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. and the cooking knowledge just isn’t there.” Cutlets are for restaurants, loin chops are for at home and shoulder chops are the homeliest of them all. Me and the boys. Mid-summer and the sun is sinking. 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. And I’ve used a venison cutlet at the Bolton ...” For generations, New Zealanders literally lived off the sheep’s (and sometimes the pig’s) back.