Home › The Principles of Cookery › Mutton Hotch-Potch
Mutton Hotch-Potch
Cut up three or four well-washed lettuces, and slice half a dozen young onions, browning them slightly in two ounces of butter; add to the onions a pound of underdone mutton minced, half a cupful of mutton broth from the boiling of the bones, and the cut-up lettuces. Stew all these ingredients together for twenty-five minutes. Stir this hotch-potch to keep it from burning, and have ready boiled a pint of peas; mix the peas with the mutton, and stir for a minute or two to make all hot. Underdone beef may be used if more convenient, and a few mushrooms, to be easily had in the country, may be chopped and fried with the onion. Probable cost, 8d., exclusive of meat.
A late-Victorian way with cold roast meat: the mutton is already cooked, so everything here is about warming it through in a bed of stewed lettuce and onion without cooking it a second time.
- The hinge: the meat is leftoversThe hinge: the meat is already cooked -- "underdone mutton" means meat from a joint roasted rare, then minced. The recipe stews it with the lettuce, onion and broth for the full twenty-five minutes, which is as much about softening the lettuce and onion as anything; a long reheat will firm the mince up.
- Young onionsSpring onions or scallions, six of them, whites and pale green sliced. Trimmed salad onions from a bunch are the closest match; a single small brown onion is not the same thing.
- Lettuce is the vegetable hereThree or four lettuces sounds vast, though the loose-headed lettuces of the period were generally smaller than a modern supermarket head. Something on the order of two romaine hearts or a large butterhead, shredded, gives a workable volume once it collapses.
- A pint of peasAn imperial pint of shelled peas is roughly 10-12 oz, nearer two and a half cups; most of a standard bag of frozen peas. Frozen need only a minute or two in the pan rather than pre-boiling.
- Half a cupful of brothSomewhere around 4 to 5 fl oz. The recipe assumes you boiled the mutton bones for stock; a light lamb or chicken stock does the job. Keep it scant, as the lettuce releases a good deal of water.
- Butter and burningTwo ounces is about 4 tablespoons, generous for a wide pan. The warning to stir is real: with only half a cup of liquid and minced meat, the base catches quickly over anything above a low heat.
- MushroomsIf using them, fry them with the onions until their liquid has driven off, or they will water down the pan.
- Yield and servingA pound of meat with the peas and lettuce feeds three or four. It is soft and wet rather than a stew; serve it with mashed or plain boiled potatoes, or on toast as a supper dish.
- "Probable cost, 8d."The recipe says the figure is exclusive of meat, so the eightpence covers only the lettuce, onions, peas and butter.
Hotch-potch comes through Old French hochepot, from a verb meaning to shake or shake together, and the same root gives English hotchpotch and hodgepodge for any jumble. In Scotland hotch-potch usually means a thick early-summer broth of mutton and the first peas, lettuce and young onions of the season, and this dish might be thought of as a dry relation, built on a similar combination of lamb and spring greens but made with meat already roasted. It belongs to the familiar Victorian pattern in which a joint appeared hot on Sunday and had to reappear in some other guise on Monday and Tuesday. The stewed lettuce is the detail most likely to surprise a modern cook, though cooked lettuce was ordinary in British and French kitchens of the period and survives in petits pois à la française. The aside about mushrooms being "easily had in the country" is a reminder that field mushrooms were gathered rather than bought, and were not reliably available to town readers.