Season mutton-chops with salt and pepper; put a tablespoonful of hot drippings in a saucepan; add the chops, some sliced turnips, potatoes and onions, salt and pepper. Then cover with water and cook slowly until tender. Thicken the sauce with a little flour mixed with ½ cup of milk. Season to taste and serve very hot.
A skeleton recipe of the kind these calendar cookbooks favoured: no quantities, no times, and an assumption that the cook already knows what a stew looks like. The points below fill in what the original leaves out.
- Quantities, since none are givenFor four people: about 2 lb bone-in mutton or lamb shoulder chops, 1 lb potatoes, 8 oz turnip, two medium onions. The stew should be barely covered with water, not swimming.
- Mutton and what to buy insteadMutton means older sheep, usually over a year and commonly over two, with a stronger flavour and more connective tissue than lamb. Ordinary supermarkets stock lamb; bone-in lamb shoulder chops or neck are the closest match in fat and gelatine. Loin chops are too lean and will dry out over a long simmer.
- DrippingsBeef or lamb drippings, saved from roasting. Any neutral fat works, though lamb fat trimmed from the chops and rendered in the pan gives the truest flavour.
- Timing"Slowly until tender" means a bare simmer for 1½ to 2 hours for mutton, closer to 1¼ hours for lamb. The meat should pull from the bone with a spoon.
- Stagger the vegetablesTurnip and onion can go in from the start; potatoes added at the outset will collapse entirely over two hours. Put them in for the last 35-40 minutes, or use half at the beginning to thicken the broth and half late for texture.
- The thickeningWhisk the flour into the cold half-cup of milk first, to a smooth slurry, then stir it into the simmering liquid. About 2 tablespoons of flour is right for this volume. Let it come back to a gentle simmer for two or three minutes to cook out the raw flour taste, but do not boil hard or the milk may split.
- Skim before you thickenMutton and lamb shoulder throw a good deal of fat. Skim it from the surface before adding the milk and flour, or the finished sauce will be greasy and refuse to bind.
- ServingServes four with bread. Chopped parsley at the table is traditional and does more for the dish than any extra seasoning.
Irish stew in its oldest form is generally said to be mutton, onion and potato with water and nothing else, cooked long and slow in a single pot over a hearth fire; it belongs to a country where sheep were kept largely for wool and milk and often eaten only when old, which is exactly the meat that rewards hours of gentle simmering. The addition of turnip and a flour-and-milk thickening, as here, is traditionally reckoned a later and more genteel habit, and purists in Ireland are often said to have argued about both. Its appearance as a calendar entry pinned to a country gave the household cook variety without a year's worth of unfamiliar ingredients, mutton and onions being available to anyone.