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Lamb, Neck of, Stewed
Joint a neck of lamb, and put it in a stewpan with a carrot, turnip, and onion sliced; add sufficient stock made from mutton bones to just cover it, or the liquor from boiled mutton will do. Put in a table-spoonful of chopped capers, and an ounce of rice, cover, and cook an hour and a half or thereabouts very gently. Put the meat and vegetables in a dish, boil the gravy quickly, add a little brown roux (see ROUX, BROWN) and seasoning; boil up again, and pour it over the meat. Probable cost, 10d. or 11d. per pound.
A plain braise of the sort that filled Victorian mid-week dinners: the neck does the work, the rice and roux thicken what comes out of it. Two things need attention — the joint itself, and how gently it cooks.
- The cutA neck of lamb means the whole neck end, bone in; "joint" it by cutting between the vertebrae, or ask the butcher to do it. Neck fillet — the boned eye from the middle neck — is easier to find and works, though you lose the gelatine the bones give the gravy. Reckon on 2–2 1/2 lb for four.
- Very gentlyThis is the hinge. The liquid should barely tremble — around 180F, no more. A rolling simmer at this length turns neck stringy and clouds the gravy with fat and scum.
- An ounce of riceAbout 2 tablespoons, and it is there as a thickener rather than a starch to eat. Long-grain is probably the nearest to what would have been used; it will soften and break down over 90 minutes and give the liquid body.
- Brown rouxEqual weights butter and flour cooked until it smells nutty and is the colour of a hazelnut shell — 1 tablespoon of each is plenty here. Whisk it into the boiling gravy off the direct heat in small pieces, or slake it with a ladle of hot liquid first, to avoid lumps.
- Stock from mutton bonesMutton stock is hard to buy; lamb bones roasted and simmered give the nearest thing, and a light chicken stock will not fight the meat. The "liquor from boiled mutton" assumes a household that had boiled a joint that week.
- CapersA tablespoon chopped, added at the start, is doing what lemon does in a modern braise — cutting the fat. If yours are salt-packed rather than in brine, rinse them or the finished gravy will be too salty to season.
- Skim before thickeningNeck is fatty. Lift the meat out, let the liquid settle a minute and spoon the fat off the surface before you reduce it, otherwise the roux binds the fat into the sauce and it turns greasy.
- Timing and yieldNinety minutes suits neck cut small; larger bone-in pieces may want two hours until the meat pulls from the bone. Serves four with potatoes.
Neck was the cheapest part of the lamb, and Cassell's quotes a price per pound — 10d. or 11d. was towards the bottom of the butcher's board in the 1870s and 80s. The capers point to the older British habit of serving lamb and mutton with a sharp, salty sauce: caper sauce with boiled leg of mutton was a fixture of the period, and here the capers simply go into the pot instead of being made up separately. The instruction to use "the liquor from boiled mutton" belongs to a kitchen that cooked in sequence, one meal's by-product becoming the next meal's foundation, and the small quantity of rice used as a thickener is a frugal alternative to spending more butter and flour than the roux requires.