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Lamb, Minced, and Peas
Cut about one pound of cold lamb into half-inch dice, removing all skin and most of the fat. Boil and drain half a pint of green peas. Have ready in a saucepan half a pint of bechamel sauce (see BECHAMEL SAUCE) at boiling point. Put in the minced lamb and the peas, season with pepper and salt, and let them remain at the side of the fire, without boiling, until the meat is thoroughly hot, which will take about twenty minutes.
A Victorian re-use of cold roast lamb, and one of the better ones: the meat is warmed through rather than cooked again. Nearly everything that can go wrong here goes wrong through heat.
- Never let it boilThe whole point of holding the pan "at the side of the fire" is that already-cooked lamb toughens and dries the moment it simmers. Use the lowest setting on a small burner, or set the pan in a wider pan of hot water, and stir occasionally.
- "Minced" means dicedIn British usage of this period mince covers any finely cut meat, and the recipe tells you the size: half-inch dice. Do not put it through a grinder; ground cold roast turns pasty in sauce.
- Imperial half-pintsCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so half a pint is 10 fl oz — about 1¼ US cups of sauce and the same volume of peas, roughly 8 oz shelled weight.
- Bechamel of the periodPeriod bechamel is generally a white roux let down with milk, often with some veal or chicken stock, infused with aromatics and strained; check the book's own BECHAMEL SAUCE entry for its version. A plain modern bechamel works, but keep it loose; it will thicken as it stands over heat and the lamb gives up no liquid to slacken it.
- Peas"Green peas" means fresh shelled peas, boiled until just tender and drained. Frozen peas are closer to the original than most substitutions on this site; give them two minutes in boiling water and drain well so they do not water the sauce.
- Twenty minutes is for cold meat from a larderTwenty minutes may reflect larder-cold meat -- Lamb straight from a modern refrigerator, in a thin layer of hot sauce over low heat, is hot through in ten to fifteen. Judge by the meat, not the clock, and get it to a genuine steaming heat rather than merely warm.
- Seasoning at the endCold roast lamb is already salted from its first cooking and the bechamel may be too. Taste after the meat has heated, not before.
- YieldA pound of meat with a cup of peas serves three, four if you send it up with rice, mashed potato or a border of toast, accompaniments often used for dishes of this kind.
Cold-meat cookery — rechauffés, in the language of the nineteenth-century kitchen — occupies a substantial part of any Victorian household manual, because a middle-class family roasted a large joint on Sunday and was expected to eat it, transformed, for several days after. The convention was that the second appearance should not look like the first, hence the dice, the white sauce and the peas rather than a plate of sliced remains. The pairing of lamb with green peas is largely seasonal: spring lamb and the first peas arrived together, and the combination was long established in English cooking before bechamel — a French sauce naturalised into British kitchens through the professional cooks of the great houses — was pressed into service to bind the leftovers. The insistence on holding the pan at the side of the fire is a coal-range instruction: the hob had permanent hot and cool zones, and knowing which to use was half of the skill this book set out to teach.