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Mutton Dormers
Boil a quarter of a pound of rice as if for curry; chop a good half-pound of underdone mutton, and three ounces of good fresh beef suet; mix these with the rice, and chop altogether. Shred finely half a shallot, add it to the other ingredients with a good seasoning of pepper and salt, and make the whole into sausages. Roll these separately into a dish of beaten egg, cover with fine bread-crumbs, and fry in hot lard or dripping until of a nice brown colour. Send the dormers to table with gravy round them, and some also in a boat. Time, about twelve minutes to fry. Probable cost, 6d., exclusive of meat.
A rissole built from Sunday's cold roast, bound with rice rather than potato or panada. The mixture is soft, so the coating and the frying temperature do all the structural work.
- The hinge: a dry rice"Boil as if for curry" means plainly boiled in plenty of salted water, drained, and dried off so the grains stay separate — not creamy or sticky. Wet rice makes a paste that slumps in the pan and bursts the crumb coat. Let it cool completely before mixing.
- "Underdone mutton"This is the cold centre of a roast leg or shoulder, still pink. Mutton is rarely sold now; a half-pound of leftover roast lamb, or of lamb shoulder, gives the closest flavour. The meat is already cooked, so the frying only needs to brown the outside and heat the inside through.
- Beef suetThree ounces of fresh beef suet is the fat that keeps the mixture succulent. Buy it from a butcher and grate it frozen, or use shredded packet suet. It is roughly a third of the meat weight by design — do not cut it back much or the dormers turn dry and mealy.
- Chop, then chop againThe instruction to chop the mixed rice, meat and suet together is deliberate: it distributes the suet and gives a cohesive, slightly coarse texture. A few pulses in a food processor works, but stop well short of a purée.
- Shaping and coatingForm into small sausages; the recipe specifies neither size nor yield, though a half-pound of meat plus rice and suet will make roughly eight. Egg and crumb them, then chill for 20-30 minutes so the coating sets and the suet firms up before they meet the fat.
- FryingShallow-fry in lard or beef dripping at about 350-375F, turning to brown all sides. Twelve minutes is right for that thickness; hotter fat browns the crumbs before the middles warm, cooler fat lets them absorb grease and split.
- The gravyMost likely the strained gravy from the original roast, reduced, though the recipe does not specify. Failing that, a well-reduced lamb or beef stock, lightly thickened, poured around the dish and the rest passed separately in a sauceboat.
- "Probable cost, 6d."Sixpence covers rice, suet, egg, crumbs and shallot only. The meat is treated as free because it was already paid for once — the whole point of the dish.
Dormers belong to the large Victorian family of made-over dishes — croquettes, rissoles, cutlets, sanders — whose purpose was to get a second dinner out of a joint of roast meat without the family recognising it as leftovers. Mutton was the everyday roasting meat of the British middle-class household, larger and stronger-flavoured than modern lamb. The name is obscure; it is sometimes said to come from the French dormeuse, and sometimes explained by the shape, but no early source pins it down, and it appears in English cookery books through the nineteenth century with little variation: cold meat, suet, rice or breadcrumbs, egg-and-crumbed and fried. The use of boiled rice as the binder, rather than potato, and the note that the rice should be done "as if for curry" both hint at the Anglo-Indian kitchen vocabulary that had become part of how British cooks talked about food.