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Garlic, Mild Ragout Of
Take off the skin from some cloves of garlic, and put them into fast-boiling water. In five minutes drain the water from them, and put in fresh. Boil another five minutes, and repeat the previous performance until the vegetable is tender. A pinch of salt may be added to the water when the garlic is nearly done enough. Mix it with the gravy which is to be sent to table with roast mutton. If it is not wished to decrease the strength of the flavour quite so much, change the water less frequently. Time, about half an hour. Sufficient, half a pint of garlic with half a pint of gravy.
A Victorian answer to garlic's reputation: boil the bite out of it in several changes of water, then fold the softened cloves into gravy. The technique is sound, but the quantities are large and the timing is generous.
- The hinge: change the water oftenEach change of boiling water carries off more of the sulphur compounds that make raw garlic sharp. Three or four changes leaves cloves that are sweet and nutty rather than pungent; one or two leaves them recognisably garlicky, which is what the last sentence of the recipe is telling you.
- Half a pint of garlicAn imperial half-pint, about 10 fl oz / 285 ml of peeled cloves, which is roughly 150 g and somewhere around four or five heads depending on their size. It is a lot of garlic, but heavily blanched cloves are mild, so the finished ragout tastes closer to a soft onion relish.
- Peeling that muchSeparate the heads and drop the unpeeled cloves in boiling water for 30 seconds first; the skins then slip off.
- Half an hour is the outside limitTest after the third five-minute boil; once a clove crushes easily against the pan, stop, or the ragout collapses into paste.
- Salt late, as writtenThe recipe holds the salt back until the garlic is nearly done; salted water may slow the leaching the method depends on, so it is worth following as written.
- The gravy"Gravy" here means the roasting-pan juices from the mutton, skimmed and possibly let down with stock, not a flour-thickened sauce. Equal volumes of garlic and gravy gives a thick, spoonable ragout; halve the garlic if you want something that pours.
- If you cannot get muttonLeg or shoulder of lamb works, though it is milder and younger than the mutton this was written for. The ragout also suits roast pork and boiled beef.
- YieldAbout a pint of finished ragout, enough for six to eight servings as a condiment alongside the roast.
Cassell's, compiled for late-Victorian British households, presents this entry as a compromise rather than a celebration. Repeated blanching in changed water is a standard French method for taming strong vegetables, and it turns up in English books of the period wherever a continental flavour was wanted without the continental intensity — garlic was widely associated with French and Italian cooking and, in polite English usage, with a smell one did not want on the breath. The dish also reflects an older habit of treating garlic as a vegetable to be cooked in quantity rather than a seasoning used by the clove, an approach still alive in southern French garlic purées and in the practice of roasting whole heads. Mutton, the meat it is meant to accompany, was the everyday roast of the era and strong enough in flavour to carry it.