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Mutton, Stewed
Take slices of half an inch thick, and without fat, from any roast joint, season them well with pepper, salt, a little shredded shallot, and mushroom powder, mixed together, and sprinkled over the meat. Put a pint of broth into a stewpan, lay in the meat with a couple of young carrots sliced, and a couple of small onions. Let the mutton stew until the carrots are tender; keep the lid of the stewpan closed. Put the meat in the centre of a hot dish, thicken the gravy with half an ounce of butter kneaded with a little flour, add any store sauce-Harvey's or any other preferred-and serve with dried rice round the dish. Time to stew meat, half an hour. Sufficient, a pound and a half of meat for four or more persons.
This is a made-over dish: cooked meat from a roast joint, gently reheated in broth rather than cooked from raw. The point is to warm it through without letting it boil, which turns already-cooked mutton stringy.
- Start with cold roast meatThe recipe assumes leftover roast mutton or lamb, sliced half an inch thick with the fat trimmed off. Raw meat cut this thin and stewed thirty minutes will be tough; the half hour is a warming-through time, not a cooking time.
- Keep it below a simmerThe recipe's one technique note is to keep the lid of the stewpan closed. Cooked mutton held at a rolling boil for half an hour goes dry and fibrous no matter how good the gravy is.
- A pint of brothAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so about 2 1/2 US cups. Lamb or beef stock both work; the liquid should just cover the meat and vegetables.
- Mushroom powderDried mushrooms ground to a powder, used as a savoury seasoning; Victorian cookery books commonly give directions for making it at home, though bottled and packeted versions were also sold. Dried porcini or shiitake blitzed in a spice grinder gives the same effect; a teaspoon is plenty for this quantity.
- Store sauce and Harvey's"Store sauce" means any bottled commercial sauce kept on the shelf. Harvey's Sauce was an anchovy-and-soy based condiment, long discontinued; Worcestershire sauce or a mushroom ketchup stands in. Add it at the end, a teaspoon at a time, and taste — these sauces are salty.
- ThickeningHalf an ounce of butter is about a tablespoon, kneaded with roughly the same volume of flour to make beurre manié. Whisk it into the hot gravy off the boil and let it come back briefly to thicken and lose the raw flour taste.
- Dried ricePlain boiled rice, drained and left in a low oven or by the fire to dry out into separate grains. Spoon it in a border around the dish; it is there to take up the gravy.
- YieldThe recipe gives a pound and a half of cooked meat as sufficient for four or more persons, with the rice. The carrots and onions are aromatics rather than a vegetable portion -- serve something green alongside.
Cassell's belongs to a generation of British household books preoccupied with what to do with the remains of a joint. A large roast was the economic centre of the middle-class dinner table, and the days that followed it were governed by "made dishes" and "re-dressed" meat — hashes, rissoles, mince, and stews like this one, dressed up with shallot, mushroom powder and a spoonful of something from a bottle. The bottled sauces themselves tell part of the story: Harvey's Sauce, a dark anchovy-and-soy relish generally traced to the late eighteenth century, was for decades a fixture of the English store cupboard, and recipe writers used it much as later cooks use Worcestershire — a shortcut to depth in a gravy built from yesterday's meat and a pint of broth.