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Lancashire Hot-Pot
Take three pounds of the best end of a neck of mutton, four mutton kidneys, a score of oysters, four onions, and three pounds of potatoes. Divide the mutton into chops, cut off about two inches and a half from the end, and trim away all superfluous fat. Place a layer at the bottom of a brown earthenware stewpot (called in Lancashire a "hot-pot dish"), and put over the mutton a layer of sliced kidneys, an onion cut into thin slices, four or five oysters, and half a pound of sliced potatoes. Sprinkle a salt-spoonful of salt, a salt-spoonful of pepper, and a tea-spoonful of curry-powder over them; then repeat the previous performance until the dish is full. Place whole potatoes at the top, and pour in the oyster liquor and half a pint of water. Put the dish into a moderate oven, and bake until the potatoes at the top are brown and crisp, but are cooked through. When ready to serve, pour half a pint of boiling gravy over the meat, and send it to table in the dish in which it was baked. Pin a napkin neatly round the dish for the sake of appearance. The oven must not be very hot, or the gravy will be dried up. If there is any danger of this, add a little more. Time, three hours and a half to bake. Probable cost, 5s. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A layered oven stew that needs almost no attention once assembled, though a few of its measures and assumptions want translating.
- A moderate ovenRead this as 325-350F (160-175C). The recipe itself insists the oven must not be very hot or the liquid will dry up before three and a half hours are out, so err toward 325F.
- Cover it, then uncoverThe recipe says nothing about a lid, but the top potatoes will only brown and crisp at the end if the pot has been covered for most of the bake; covering for the bulk of the time and taking the lid off toward the end is one way to manage it.
- A score of oystersTwenty. Buy them shucked with their liquor if you can, since the liquor is called for separately. Layered in at the start they will cook for the full three and a half hours and end up small and firm; they are there for savour rather than texture.
- Salt-spoonfulA salt-spoon was about a quarter of a teaspoon. Since the seasoning is repeated over every layer, the total lands near a teaspoon each of salt and pepper for the whole pot, plus a tablespoon or so of curry powder.
- Best end of neckThe rib section of the neck, sold today as lamb cutlets or rack chops. The recipe has you cut about two and a half inches from the end of the chops and trim away superfluous fat; no reason is given. Mutton is scarce, and hogget or ordinary lamb will be tender well before the three and a half hours are up.
- Mutton kidneysLamb's kidneys from a butcher. Halve them, snip out the white core, and rinse before slicing, or they will make the gravy sharp.
- The potA tall glazed earthenware crock with straight sides. Any deep casserole with a lid does the job, though a narrow one gives the layering the original intends.
- The gravyHalf a pint of boiling gravy poured over at the end means real stock, ideally lamb, reduced. Have it hot; cold stock poured onto a browned crust collapses it.
- YieldSix to eight as written, using three pounds each of meat and potatoes. The recipe gives the probable cost as 5s.
Hot-pot belongs to industrial Lancashire, where a deep glazed crock could be filled in the morning, left in a slow oven or carried to the baker's for the day's residual heat, and eaten at night without a cook standing over it. The oysters are the part that surprises modern readers, but oysters were far cheaper and more plentiful in the nineteenth century than they are now, and turn up as bulk in steak pies and stews; the native beds declined over the later nineteenth century and prices rose accordingly. The curry powder is a Victorian addition rather than anything older, commercial curry powder being a familiar English store-cupboard item by this date. The napkin pinned round the dish is a reminder that this was a plain regional dish being dressed for a middle-class table, sent up in its own pot because it could not be turned out of one.