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Hotch-Potch, Scotch
Take three quarts of good mutton broth. Put it into a deep stewpan, and let it boil; then put with it a quart of young vegetables sliced, including equal quantities of carrots, turnips, onions, finely-shredded lettuce, springs of cauliflower, and a little chopped parsley. Add a pint of freshly-shelled green peas, and three pounds of mutton chops, cut either from the loin or the best end of the neck, and freed from all super-fluous fat. If preferred, lamb may be substituted for mutton; in either case the meat must be fresh and sweet, and the vegetables young. Boil until the meat and vegetables are tender, then add another pint of peas and a little pepper and salt, and, when these are tender, serve in a deep dish. Time, about two hours. Probable cost, 4s. Sufficient for ten or twelve persons.
A Victorian one-pot soup-stew that works exactly as written; the only real decisions are about timing and how much fat you leave in.
- Quantities in modern measuresThese are imperial measures in a British book: three quarts is about 3.4 litres of broth; a quart of sliced vegetables is roughly a litre prepared, and a pint of peas about 570 ml. Three pounds of chops is about 1.4 kg bone-in.
- The two-stage peasThis is the hinge of the dish. The first pint cooks down into the broth and thickens and sweetens it; the second goes in near the end and stays green and whole. Skipping the split ruins the texture the recipe is aiming at.
- Two hours is for muttonMature mutton on the bone genuinely wants that long. Modern lamb neck or loin chops will be tender in 45-60 minutes, and lamb loin chops sooner still. Cook to the point where the meat pulls from the bone rather than to the clock.
- Best end of neckThat is the rib end of the neck, sold today as lamb rack chops or cutlets; scrag or neck fillet is the cheaper and better-flavoured choice for long simmering. Loin chops are leaner and cook faster.
- Skim, and skim again"Freed from all superfluous fat" is not optional with mutton. Trim before cooking and skim the surface repeatedly, or chill the finished pot and lift the set fat off before reheating.
- Frozen peasFreshly-shelled green peas were a summer luxury. Frozen peas are a fair substitute for the second addition, but they need only three or four minutes; add them at the very end.
- The lettuce and cauliflowerShredded lettuce dissolves almost entirely and is there for body and sweetness, not as a visible vegetable. Cauliflower sprigs will collapse over two hours, so add them in the last 20 minutes if you want them intact.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives ten or twelve; served as a main dish in its own right it would stretch rather less far, perhaps six to eight generously. Serve in deep bowls with the chops in the broth, and bread alongside.
Hotch-potch is the Scots form of a word that runs back through Anglo-Norman hochepot, from a verb meaning to shake or jumble together, and it is a cousin of the legal term hotchpot and of the English hodgepodge. In Scotland it settled on one specific thing: a summer soup of mutton or lamb boiled with the first young vegetables of the season, distinguished from the year-round barley-and-root Scotch broth by the absence of grain and the insistence on new peas, small carrots and immature turnips. Cassell's presents it in the era when it was, by all accounts, a summer dish, and the two-stage addition of peas that this version specifies is often said to be traditional rather than a Cassell's invention. The "probable cost, 4s." gives a sense of scale: four shillings for a pot feeding a dozen places this as an economical family dinner rather than a cheap one.