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Lamb, with Cucumber
Stew a breast, loin, or neck of lamb, until it is sufficiently tender to draw out the bones. Drain and trim it, brush it over with beaten egg, and strew seasoned bread-crumbs thickly upon it. Have ready some cucumber, prepared as follows. Procure two or three fresh young cucumbers. Take off the rind, remove the seeds, and cut them into pieces, lengthwise. Sprinkle salt and pepper upon them, and fry them in hot butter for five or six minutes. Put them into a stewpan, cover them with some of the liquid in which the lamb was stewed, and let them simmer gently for twenty minutes. Broil the lamb (see LAMB, BROILED); place the cucumber and gravy on a hot dish, and serve the lamb upon them. Garnish with sliced lemon and parsley. Time, altogether, about two hours. Probable cost of lamb, 10d. or 1s. per pound. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A two-stage dish: the lamb is stewed until boneless, then crumbed and grilled, while the cucumbers are cooked twice in butter and in the stewing liquor. The whole thing hinges on getting the meat pressed and cold-ish before it is coated.
- Bone it while warm, then pressA breast needs a good hour and a half at a bare simmer before the rib bones and cartilage pull cleanly out, and the recipe's "about two hours" covers the whole dish, so the stewing has to fit inside that. Pressing the boned meat flat between two trays with a weight until cool is not in the recipe, but a warm, floppy breast will not readily take an egg-and-crumb coat or hold its shape under the grill.
- "Broil" means the grillIn this book broiling is direct radiant heat, originally a gridiron over coals. Use an overhead broiler or a ridged grill pan, but keep the crumbed lamb 4 to 5 inches from the element; crumbs over butter-rich breast scorch quickly at close range. The meat is already cooked through from the stewing, so the grilling is only to set and colour the crumbs.
- Seasoned bread-crumbsDry white crumbs with salt and pepper; the seasoning may also take in chopped herbs or lemon zest, though the recipe does not specify. Fine dried crumbs adhere and colour more evenly than coarse, open crumbs such as panko.
- The cucumbersCucumbers of the period were often larger and coarser-seeded than modern ones, though this recipe asks specifically for fresh young ones; either way peeling and seeding was routine. A modern English cucumber needs only peeling and quartering lengthwise. Salting the pieces for 20 minutes and patting them dry before frying will stop the butter spitting, though the recipe salts and fries straight away.
- Don't over-simmer the cucumberTwenty minutes in stock will reduce young cucumber to pulp. Ten to twelve minutes is enough for it to turn translucent and still hold together; lift the pieces out and reduce the liquor separately if it is thin.
- The gravyThe stewing liquid will be greasy and mild. Skim it well, then boil it down hard to a scant cup before the cucumbers go in, or the finished dish sits in a pale puddle. A squeeze of the garnish lemon at the end lifts it.
- Costs and yieldThe 10d.-to-1s. per pound is Victorian retail pricing and of historical interest only. Three to four servings is what the recipe claims; it gives no weight for the joint.
Cooked cucumber is one of the vegetable habits the twentieth century quietly dropped. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries English cooks stewed, fried, and stuffed cucumbers as a matter of course, and the pairing with lamb or mutton cutlets was a familiar one; raw cucumber, by contrast, carried a long-standing reputation for being cold and indigestible, which is part of why so many recipes cook it. The technique here, stewing a cheap cut until the bones can be drawn, pressing it, then crumbing and grilling it, is the classic English treatment of breast of lamb, a way of making a fatty, awkward joint into something that can be sliced and served with a knife and fork. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, generally dated to the mid-1870s and reissued in expanded editions for decades after, was built for exactly this kind of middle-class economy: a cut costing pennies a pound, dressed up with egg, crumbs, lemon and parsley to look like something better.