Home › Fragments › MUTTON PIE AND TOMATOES
MUTTON PIE AND TOMATOES
Spread the bottom of a baking-dish with bread-crumbs, and fill with alternate layers of cold roast mutton, cut in thin slices, and tomatoes, peeled and sliced; season each layer with pepper, salt and bits of butter. The last layer should be of tomatoes spread with breadcrumbs. Bake three-quarters of an hour, and serve immediately.
A leftovers dish from the "Fragments" chapter, built on cold roast mutton and fresh tomatoes. It needs very little translation, but a few things are left unsaid.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Forty-five minutes suits a moderate oven, 350F, which is hot enough to soften the tomatoes and brown the crumb top without drying the already-cooked meat.
- The meat is already cookedThis is a reheating dish, not a braise. Slice the mutton thin, no more than 1/4 inch, so it warms through in the same time the tomatoes take to collapse. Thick slices will still be cold in the middle or tough by the time they are hot.
- Mutton substitutionTrue mutton, from a sheep over a year old, is rare at retail in the United States; lamb shoulder or leg is the practical stand-in. Cold roast beef or pork works with the same method, though the flavor is milder against the tomato.
- Tomatoes and liquidPeeled fresh tomatoes shed a great deal of juice as they bake. Use ripe but firm fruit; the recipe gives no instruction to cover the dish, and baking uncovered throughout lets the top crumbs crisp rather than steam.
- Canned as an alternativeOut of season, drained canned whole tomatoes are closer to the original than pale fresh ones. Drain them well or the pie will be soupy.
- PeelingTo peel, cut a shallow cross in the base and drop into boiling water for 20 to 30 seconds, then into cold water. The skins slip off; left on, they curl into leathery strips in the finished dish.
- Crumbs and butterDry, coarse breadcrumbs, rather than fresh soft ones, hold up better top and bottom. The recipe gives no quantity for the "bits of butter"; about a tablespoon dotted over each layer is a reasonable working amount, and it is what carries the seasoning through.
- YieldAbout 1 lb of sliced meat and 2 lb of tomatoes will fill a 2-quart dish and serve four. The recipe says to serve it immediately; it is at its best straight from the oven and does not improve on a second reheating.
Buckeye Cookery includes a chapter on "Fragments," the nineteenth-century household term for what we would call leftovers, and it reflects a kitchen economy in which a roast joint was expected to reappear in some form on following days. Mutton was a common roasting meat in the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century, and cold mutton, congealed and heavy, was often given help from something acid; tomatoes serve that purpose here. Similar pairings of cold meat and tomatoes turn up in other cookbooks of the period. That the tomatoes are treated as an unremarkable everyday vegetable is itself worth noting: earlier in the century they were, by long-repeated tradition at least, regarded in some quarters with suspicion, and by the time this book appeared in the late 1870s they were in wide use in American home cooking, fresh in summer and canned the rest of the year.