Home › The Principles of Cookery › MUTTON AND VEGETABLES, STEW OF (Invalid Cookery)
MUTTON AND VEGETABLES, STEW OF (Invalid Cookery)
Take half a pound of lean neck of mutton, put it in a jar with the grated red part of a small carrot, a tea-spoonful each of minced onion and celery, and half a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley. Season with salt and pepper and a clove, and add enough lukewarm stock to cover. Cover the jar, and let the contents cook in a pan of boiling water for two hours. A tea-spoonful of rice or sago may be added when the contents of the jar have reached simmering point. Remove the clove, and serve. Or the liquor may be strained, and the vegetables pressed through a sieve and added to it.
An invalid-cookery stew, cooked in a covered jar set in simmering water so nothing scorches and the broth stays clear. The method is the point: gentle, indirect heat for two hours.
- The jarAny heatproof stoneware or glass jar with a lid works, or a wide-mouth canning jar with the ring left loose so steam can escape. Stand it on a folded cloth or a trivet in the pan so it does not rattle against the base, and keep the water at least halfway up the sides, topping up with boiling water as it evaporates.
- Neck of muttonMature mutton is rare outside halal and specialist butchers. Lamb neck fillet or bone-in neck slices, trimmed of fat, behaves the same over two hours; half a pound is about 225 g.
- The red part of the carrotVictorian cooks distinguished the sweeter outer flesh from the paler, woodier core. Grate the outside of a small carrot and discard the core, or simply use a whole young carrot, which is uniformly tender.
- StockEnough to cover is probably in the region of 250-300 ml, depending on the width of the jar. Use an unsalted or lightly salted light stock; the liquid reduces very little in a covered jar, so anything already salty will finish harsh. The stock is specified lukewarm rather than cold or boiling, though the recipe does not say why; sparing the jar a sudden change of temperature is one likely reason.
- SagoSago is palm starch, sold as small pearls; tapioca pearls or short-grain rice are direct stand-ins. Add it after the first twenty minutes or so, once the contents are genuinely hot, or it will sink into a paste on the bottom.
- The cloveOne clove in this volume is assertive after two hours. Fish it out before serving as instructed, and consider leaving it out entirely if the stew is for someone with little appetite.
- Serving and yieldThis is one invalid's portion, perhaps 250 ml of broth and meat. The strained-and-sieved version gives a thin puree that is easier to take; a stick blender does the sieve's work in seconds.
- DonenessWater-bath cooking holds the contents just below boiling, so two hours is a minimum rather than a maximum. The meat should shred under a fork; if it still resists, give it another thirty minutes.
Invalid cookery had a place in many late-Victorian household manuals, and Cassell's is no exception: a sickroom diet was one of the things a competent housekeeper was expected to manage, since convalescence from fever or surgery often ran for weeks at home. The jar-in-a-pan technique here is a domestic version of the bain-marie, and closely related to the beef teas and mutton broths of the period, all built on the belief that gentle prolonged heat drew the goodness out of meat without the coarseness of a hard boil. The insistence on removing the clove, straining the liquor and sieving the vegetables reflects the period's conviction that an invalid's digestion could not manage fibre or fragments, a view medicine has since largely abandoned. Mutton neck was a cheap, gelatinous cut.