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Lamb Steaks Ragout
Take two pounds of lamb steaks, strew a little white pepper and powdered mace over them, and put them into a saucepan with a quarter of a pint of liquid, half of which should be milk and half white stock. Let them simmer as softly as possible, without ceasing, for an hour and a quarter, or until tender. Just before serving mix a tea-spoonful of mushroom-powder and a tea-spoonful of flour very smoothly with a table-spoonful of cold milk. Stir this to the sauce, add a salt-spoonful of salt, a wine-glassful of boiling cream, and half a dozen white mushrooms ready stewed; serve immediately. Great care must be taken in preparing this dish that the meat is very gently simmered. If it is allowed to boil quickly it will be hard, dry, and unpalatable. When gently simmered it is excellent. Probable cost, 10d. per pound. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A white braise: no browning, no colour in the sauce, and a very low heat held for over an hour. The liquid is scant, so the pan and the flame matter more than anything else here.
- The hingeThe instruction repeated twice in the original is the one that counts — the liquid must never reach a rolling boil. Lamb held just below a simmer, with barely a tremble at the surface, comes out silky; boiled hard in this little liquid it tightens and dries. Use the lowest burner setting, a heavy pan and a tight lid, and check every 20 minutes.
- Quarter of a pintFive imperial fluid ounces, so a scant 2/3 cup total: about 1/3 cup milk and 1/3 cup white stock. That will only stay put under a well-fitting lid; top up with a spoonful of stock if the pan threatens to go dry.
- Wine-glassful and salt-spoonA wine-glass in Victorian cookery books is roughly 2 fl oz (1/4 cup); a salt-spoon is about 1/4 teaspoon. Warm the cream before it goes in so the sauce does not drop out of temperature at the last moment.
- Lamb steaksThe original does not specify the cut; leg or chump slices are the likeliest reading. Leg steaks or thick-cut shoulder steaks both work; shoulder is fattier and more forgiving over the long, slow hour. Boneless leg steaks may be tender well before 75 minutes, so test at 45.
- Mushroom powderDried mushrooms ground fine, a common savoury seasoning of the period and often made at home. Any dried mushroom blitzed in a spice grinder does the job; porcini is stronger and darker than the original intends, so use a scant teaspoon.
- White stockAn unbrowned stock from veal or poultry bones, kept pale deliberately. A light chicken stock is the closest supermarket equivalent; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy the colour the dish is built around.
- White mushrooms ready stewedSmall button mushrooms gently cooked in a little butter, milk or stock beforehand, without letting them brown. Add them at the end only to heat through — they have already given up their liquid and will not thicken the sauce further.
- ThickeningThe teaspoon of flour slaked in cold milk gives a barely-there sauce, not a gravy. The original stirs it in at the last moment and goes straight on to the boiling cream, so keep the pan below a boil and allow it only the briefest cooking before finishing.
- Yield and priceThree or four servings, as stated. The "10d. per pound" is a costing note for the household accounts, of a kind Cassell's gives throughout; it dates the book rather than helping the cook.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the English domestic dictionary, when a household manual was expected to price every dish as well as describe it, and this entry is a textbook example of the "white" branch of stewing — meat cooked without browning, in milk and pale stock, finished with cream and mushrooms so that nothing on the plate is darker than ivory. That aesthetic came into English kitchens by way of French practice, where a blanquette or fricassée is built on the same refusal to colour the meat, and it survived in Britain longest in invalid and nursery cookery, where pale food was thought gentler. The two ingredients that mark the page as Victorian are mushroom powder and white stock, both things a well-run kitchen made in quantity for itself: mushrooms were dried and ground at home, and stock was classified by colour because its colour determined which dishes it could be used in. The insistence, twice over, on gentle simmering reflects a period reality — coal ranges made steady low heat the hardest thing in the kitchen to achieve, and worth warning about.