Home › The Principles of Cookery › MUTTON, HASHED (a l'Indienne)
MUTTON, HASHED (a l'Indienne)
Cut some slices from a cold roast leg or shoulder of mutton, frec them from skin, etc., and reserve on a plate; chop a large onion finely, and fry it in clarified butter with a tea-spoonful of minced parsley, until it is of a light brown hue; add a large dessert-spoonful of "Empress" curry-paste, half a pint of either stock or gravy, and a dessert-spoonful of Luck-now chutney; make very hot, then thicken with a little flour and butter kneaded together, add the sliced mutton, make hot again, and serve with a border of either well-boiled rice or mashed potato. Curry-powder may be used instead of the paste, if desired, but the paste gives the best results.
A Victorian way of using up the Sunday joint: the sauce is built first and the cooked meat only warmed through at the end. Read that as an instruction, not a suggestion.
- Do not stew the muttonThe slices are already roasted. Once they go into the sauce they need three or four minutes to heat through, no more; any real simmering squeezes them dry and stringy. If the sauce needs adjusting, do it before the meat goes in.
- Spoon measuresA dessert-spoon is reckoned at about 2 teaspoons, a teaspoon roughly the modern one, though Victorian spoons were not standardised. So: a good 2 teaspoons or more of curry paste (the recipe says a *large* dessert-spoonful), 2 teaspoons chutney, 1 teaspoon minced parsley.
- Half a pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups of stock or leftover gravy.
- "Empress" curry-pasteA proprietary curry paste sold under that trade name in the period; it is no longer on the market. Any decent jarred curry paste works; a madras-style paste is closest to the intended flavour. The book is right that paste beats powder here, because the spices are already cooked in oil and will not taste raw in a dish this quick.
- Lucknow chutneyA commercial Indian-style sweet-sour chutney sold in Britain at the time. Mango chutney is the usual substitute; chop any large pieces of fruit so they disperse.
- Clarified butterGhee is near enough the same thing and easier to buy, though it is cooked a little further and tastes nuttier. It matters because the onion is to be fried to light brown, and the milk solids in whole butter will scorch before it gets there.
- ThickeningEqual weights of flour and soft butter kneaded to a paste (beurre manié) — start with about 2 teaspoons of each, whisk it into the hot liquid in small pieces, and let it cook a minute so the flour loses its rawness.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no weight of meat; half a pint of sauce will carry roughly two to three servings' worth of slices. The border is piped or spooned mashed potato, or rice pressed into a ring mould and turned out, with the hash in the centre.
Hashed mutton "a l'Indienne" belongs to the long British habit of curry as a leftovers strategy rather than a dish cooked from scratch — Hannah Glasse had a curry recipe by the mid-eighteenth century, and by the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled in the Victorian period, bottled curry pastes and Indian-style chutneys were staple grocery items in British kitchens, sold under trade names like the "Empress" paste specified here. Books of this kind are full of such recipes because a large roast joint was normal in a middle-class household and Monday and Tuesday had to be got through: spice, chutney and a thickened gravy disguised the fact that the meat was on its second appearance. Mutton — mature sheep, generally reckoned at over two years old, stronger in flavour than lamb and now uncommon in British and American shops — stood up to this treatment far better than lamb does, which is part of why the combination of curry and cold roast sheep was such a fixture of the period.