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Mutton, Haricot
Take about three pounds of best end of neck of mutton, trim off some of the fat, and cut the meat into rather thin chops; fry them in a little fat to a pale brown. Cut a large carrot and turnip into dice and an onion into slices, and fry them in the same fat, but do not let them brown. Lay the mutton at the bottom of a stewpan, then the vegetables, and pour over them just sufficient boiling stock to cover the whole. Let it boil up once, skim well, and simmer for an hour; add a little ketchup, pepper and salt to taste, and serve. (See also HARICOT MUTTON.)
A plain braise of chops and root vegetables, and one where the name misleads: there are no haricot beans in it. Two things need attention — the cut, and the fact that real mutton will not be tender in an hour.
- Best end of neckThis is the rib section, the cut sold today as a rack; separated it gives rib chops. Ask for lamb rib or shoulder chops about half an inch thick, roughly 3 lb bone-in, which serves four.
- Mutton vs. lambMutton is sheep over two years old, with dense, close-grained meat. If you actually source mutton, an hour's simmer will not soften it — reckon on two to two and a half hours, or use lamb, for which the original hour is about right.
- KetchupIn a Victorian English kitchen this means mushroom or walnut ketchup: thin, dark, salty, closer to Worcestershire than to anything sweet. A tablespoon of mushroom ketchup, or Worcestershire sauce, gives the intended savoury lift. Tomato ketchup does not.
- Stock"Just sufficient to cover" is about 1 to 1.5 pints for this quantity in a snug pan. Adding it boiling keeps the pan temperature up so the browning is not wasted; adding cold stock stalls the cook for several minutes.
- Frying the vegetablesThe instruction not to brown them is deliberate — browned onion and carrot in a pale broth read as burnt sugar. Sweat them in the mutton fat over moderate heat until they smell sweet, five to seven minutes.
- Simmer, not boilOne boil up, skim, then hold at a bare tremble around 180-190F. A rolling boil shreds the outside of the chops and emulsifies the fat back into the liquid, leaving it cloudy and greasy.
- Seasoning at the endSalt goes in with the ketchup, after the reduction, as the book has it. Stock reduces by a fifth or so over an hour and early salting easily overshoots.
- ServingThe gravy is deliberately thin. Skim the fat from the surface before serving; if you want it thicker, a beurre manié whisked in off the boil is closer to period practice than cornstarch.
The name has nothing to do with beans. English cookbooks took it from the older French halicot or haricot de mouton, a mutton stew whose name is generally traced to the verb harigoter, to cut up or shred — the meat, not the pulses. By the eighteenth century the French spelling had collided with haricot, the bean, and later cooks quite reasonably began adding beans to the dish, which is why the term drifted. Cassell's keeps the older, beanless sense here while cross-referencing HARICOT MUTTON with a bare "See also". The cut is the rack, a mid-to-good cut rather than one of the cheap stewing necks like scrag or middle neck, and exactly the kind of meat a Victorian household stewed with root vegetables and a spoonful of bottled ketchup.