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Lamb Fricassee with Dumplings
Cut up and dice enough cold lamb to make 1 quart. Season with salt and white pepper, put into Criscoed baking dish and pour over following sauce: Blend 2 tablespoons Crisco with 2 tablespoons flour, and cook until brown. Now add 2 cups water and when it boils season with salt, pepper, onion juice to taste and pour over meat. Cover and bake in moderate oven 20 minutes. To make the dumplings, sift together 2 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon sugar, and 2 teaspoons baking powder. Add 1 tablespoon Crisco and rub in with tips of fingers, then add sufficient milk to make soft dough. Roll out and cut into small biscuits. Place on top of lamb and bake in hot oven for 12 minutes. Serve hot.
A leftover-roast dish built around a brown roux gravy and biscuit dumplings baked on top rather than steamed. Almost everything here still works; the fat, the oven language and the gravy consistency are what need attention.
- Crisco is the point of the bookThis came out of a promotional cookbook for hydrogenated shortening, so Crisco appears in every step, greased dish included. Butter, lard or a neutral oil all substitute one for one, and butter will give the roux more flavour than shortening does.
- Oven temperaturesA "moderate oven" is usually taken as about 350-375F, and a "hot oven" as about 425-450F; get the oven up to heat before the biscuits go on, or they will slump into the gravy instead of rising off it.
- How much lambA quart of diced cold meat is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, the usable yield of a small shoulder or the tail end of a leg. It feeds four to six with the dumplings.
- The gravy is deliberately thinThe gravy is thin -- Two tablespoons of flour to two cups of liquid gives a pouring sauce, not a stew. The biscuits absorb liquid as they bake, but if you like more body use three tablespoons of flour and expect a proper gravy.
- Water, or betterLamb stock, or water with the roasting-pan juices, transforms this. The recipe as written calls for plain water; nothing in the method objects to stock.
- Onion juicePeriod cooks grated an onion and pressed out the liquid to season without visible pieces. A tablespoon of grated onion, or a small onion softened in the fat before the flour goes in, does the same job.
- The dumplings are biscuitsSifted flour, baking powder, rubbed-in fat and milk is a baking-powder biscuit dough. Handle it as little as possible, roll to about 1/2 inch, and cut them small so the centres set in the short bake.
- Timing the toppingTwelve minutes at 450F suits thin, small biscuits. Anything thicker needs 15 to 18 minutes; check that the undersides facing the gravy are set and not doughy before serving.
- Reheated meatThe lamb is already cooked, so the first 20 minutes only warms it through and lets it take up the sauce. Longer baking will not improve it and will dry the dice out.
This is from one of the Crisco recipe books, generally dated to the years when Procter & Gamble were teaching American cooks to use a shortening that behaved like lard but came from cottonseed oil, and the recipes were written to put the product into every stage of a dish. The dish itself is older than the fat: a fricassee traditionally means meat cut up and cooked in a sauce rather than roasted whole, and by the nineteenth century in English and American kitchens the word had drifted to cover almost any cut-up meat served in gravy, including cold roast repurposed the day after. The biscuit-dough topping is the American branch of the dumpling family, leavened with baking powder and baked dry on top rather than dropped into liquid and steamed, and it turns a plateful of yesterday's lamb into a Sunday-looking supper.