Season a quarter of a young lamb and cut into pieces. Lay in a large stew-pan and cover with hot water. Add 1 sliced onion, 2 sliced green peppers and 2 tomatoes, 1 red pepper and 2 sprigs of parsley. Let stew slowly until tender. Then fry thin slices of egg-plant and add to the stew. Serve hot.
July 3 — No. 3
Turkish
A short, loosely written stew that works well once you settle two things the original leaves vague: how much lamb a "quarter" is, and how much water it should sit in.
- A quarter of a young lambOn a spring lamb this might be something in the range of 7 to 10 lb bone-in, depending on the animal, which is a great deal of meat by modern household standards. For four, use 2 to 2 1/2 lb of bone-in shoulder or neck cut into 2-inch pieces, and scale the vegetables by the same fraction.
- Do not drown it"Cover with hot water" produces a thin broth. Add water to come about halfway up the meat, keep the lid on, and let the tomatoes and lamb fat make up the rest. If it does end up loose, lift out the meat and boil the liquid down before serving.
- Stew slowly means a bare simmerShoulder and neck need 1 1/2 to 2 hours at a lazy simmer, barely bubbling. The original is a stew-pan on the stove, so keep it on a low burner. A hard boil tightens the muscle and makes the meat slower to come round.
- Season the meat first"Season" here means salt and pepper before it goes in the pan. Browning the pieces in a little oil first is not in the original, but it costs ten minutes and does more for the finished dish than anything else you can add.
- The peppersThe 'green peppers' of the period may well have been thinner-walled frying types rather than a modern blocky bell, though the text does not say. The single 'red pepper' is most likely a hot one, in which case one small dried red chile or a good pinch of Aleppo pepper does the job.
- TomatoesTwo fresh tomatoes, peeled and chopped. Out of season, use a cup of canned chopped tomatoes with their juice and reduce the added water accordingly.
- The eggplantSlice about 1/2 inch thick, salt for 20 minutes, blot dry, then fry in oil until browned on both sides. Add it in the last five minutes only, off the boil, or the slices collapse into the broth instead of sitting on top of it.
- ServingScaled to 2 1/2 lb of lamb this serves four, with rice, bulgur pilaf or flatbread to take up the liquid.
Books of this kind, arranged as a dish a day from a different country, were selling a version of the world to American home cooks who were unlikely to travel: "Turkish" here is a shorthand for lamb, eggplant, peppers and tomatoes together in one pot, which is a fair enough sketch of an Ottoman-influenced kitchen even if the recipe names no dish. What is described sits close to the family of Turkish stews and türlü-style vegetable braises, and to the wider Levantine habit of frying eggplant separately and returning it to the pot so it keeps its own character. The eggplant is the tell: it is often said to have been a somewhat unfamiliar vegetable in English-language cookbooks of the period, usually met as "egg-plant" sliced and fried, and its appearance may hint at a recipe borrowed from the Mediterranean or the American South rather than from the compiler's own table.