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Lamb, Stewed, with Peas
Take a breast or loin of lamb, weighing about two pounds. Cut it into neat chops, season them with a tea-spoonful of salt, and half a tea-spoonful of white pepper, and dredge a little flour over them. Put a piece of butter, the size of a walnut, into a frying-pan. Let it dissolve, then put in the chops, and let them remain until lightly browned on both sides. Pour away the fat, add three-quarters of a pint of unseasoned boiling stock, a cos lettuce cut in long strips, a leaf of tarragon, two shallots finely minced, a tea-spoonful of sifted sugar, half a salt-spoonful of salt, and the eighth of a small nutmeg, grated. Cover the pan closely, and simmer gently for a quarter of an hour. Put a pint of green peas freshly shelled into the saucepan, and simmer again until they are tender, which, if they are young, will be in a quarter of an hour. Serve the peas on the dish with the lamb. Time, eight minutes to fry the chops. Probable cost, 3s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian version of the French braise of lamb with lettuce and peas. Two things need adjusting: the cut, and the point at which the peas go in.
- Breast needs longer than loinLoin chops are tender and will be done in the fifteen minutes given. Breast of lamb is fatty and full of connective tissue and wants 60 to 90 minutes of gentle simmering before it is pleasant to eat, so braise it first and add the peas and lettuce only in the last stretch.
- Three-quarters of a pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 15 fl oz, a little under two US cups. Enough to come partway up the chops rather than cover them.
- Butter the size of a walnutRoughly a tablespoon, though the walnut is an approximate measure and is sometimes read as up to an ounce.
- Salt-spoonA quarter teaspoon. Half a salt-spoonful is an eighth of a teaspoon, which with the teaspoon already used on the chops is a sensible total for two pounds of meat.
- Cos lettuceRomaine. Shredded lengthways it collapses into the braise and thickens it slightly; it is a seasoning here, not a vegetable side.
- Sifted sugarCaster or superfine sugar. A teaspoon is there to lift the peas, not to sweeten the sauce noticeably.
- The peasA pint of shelled peas is around a pound, which means roughly two pounds in the pod. Fresh garden peas of the sort Cassell's assumed do take ten to fifteen minutes; modern shelled or frozen peas need three to five and turn grey and mealy if given a quarter of an hour.
- Skim before servingThe instruction to pour away the frying fat matters, and breast in particular will release more as it cooks. Spoon it off the surface before you dish up or the sauce will be greasy.
- YieldFour to five servings as the recipe states, with bread or potatoes. "Probable cost, 3s." is a Victorian price and of no use beyond showing this was a modest household dish.
This is an English rendering of the French braise usually met as petits pois à la française or agneau aux petits pois, in which lettuce, shallot and a pinch of sugar are cooked down with young peas until they make their own sauce. The lettuce points to the French kitchen-garden method of cooking peas rather than to English boiling, and its presence here suggests how far French technique had been absorbed into the middle-class English repertoire by the time Cassell's dictionary appeared in the later nineteenth century. Tarragon and shallot point the same way. The choice of breast or loin is a household economy: breast was a cheap cut, and a dish costing three shillings and feeding four or five was a modest household dish.