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Lamb, Leg of, Stewed, with Bechamel, or White Sauce
Put a leg of lamb into a convenient-sized stewpan, and with it two or three veal-bones. Cover it with boiling water, bring it gently again to the boil, and remove the scum carefully as it rises. Add two large carrots, two bunches of parsley, one bunch of thyme, and half a dozen peppercorns, and simmer very gently for an hour and a half. Take half a pint of the gravy, and mix it with half a pint of good cream. Add a table-spoonful of flour smoothly mixed with a little water, a bunch of parsley, a dozen small mushrooms, and a tea-spoonful of salt, and boil slowly for an hour. Put the lamb on a hot dish, strain the bechamel over it, and garnish with slices of lemon and parsley. Boiled cauliflower or carrots are an excellent accompaniment to this dish. Probable cost, 1s. per pound. Sufficient for five persons.
A poached leg of lamb finished with a cream sauce built from its own broth. The method is sound, but two of the timings belong to a different era of meat and need adjusting.
- The hinge: the sauce does not need an hourBoiling the cream and stock for a full hour was a way of both reducing and cooking out raw flour. Fifteen to twenty minutes at a bare simmer thickens it and loses the pasty taste; longer and the cream can split or catch. Add the mushrooms in the last ten minutes so they keep their shape.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint in a British book of this period is 10 fl oz, so roughly 1¼ cups each of gravy and cream. A tablespoon of flour to 2½ cups of liquid gives a pouring sauce, not a coating one; use two if you want it to cling.
- Cooking time and donenessAn hour and a half at a gentle simmer suits a leg of moderate size; the recipe gives no weight. Modern legs are often larger; go by temperature at the thickest part rather than the clock, and keep the water barely trembling or the outer meat shreds.
- Veal bonesThey are there chiefly for gelatine and body rather than for pronounced flavour, and many butchers will still sell or give them. A split veal knuckle is ideal; a couple of pig's trotters, or a good unsalted chicken stock in place of the water, do much the same job.
- "Bechamel" in 1900"Bechamel" here -- Not the milk-and-butter sauce of the modern definition. Here it means a white sauce enriched with cream and built on the cooking liquor, closer to what a French kitchen would call a velouté.
- Bunches, not sprigsTwo bunches of parsley and one of thyme is a great deal by current habits, but it is flavouring a large pot of water that also becomes the sauce. Tie the herbs together so you can lift them out cleanly; the recipe adds fresh parsley again to the sauce, which is worth keeping.
- Salt and seasoningA teaspoon of salt goes into the sauce only, so the meat itself is poached unseasoned. Salt the poaching water lightly as well, and check the finished sauce after reducing, when it will taste saltier than it did.
- Yield"Sufficient for five persons" probably assumes the joint as one dish among several. A leg of around 5 lb will serve six to eight as a main dish, and the leftover broth is excellent stock.
- CostThe "probable cost" of one shilling a pound is quoted, as Cassell's does throughout, so that a reader could budget the dish.
Boiling or stewing a large joint rather than roasting it was a familiar practice in nineteenth-century English kitchens: it freed the oven and produced a broth that became the sauce, the next day's soup, or both. The finish here — stock and cream thickened with flour, mushrooms, lemon slices — shows the influence of French service on English household cookery: Cassell's applies the name "bechamel" loosely, as many books of the period did, to almost any pale flour-thickened sauce rather than to the strict milk-based version of later codification. The instruction to serve boiled cauliflower or carrots alongside is characteristic of the book's practical bent, and the quoted price per pound is a reminder that Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was written for a household keeping accounts as closely as it kept recipes.