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Olio
An olio is a Spanish dish, and consists of three or four different kinds of meat and vegetables stewed and served together. The following is a simple recipe. Truss a chicken for boiling, brown it lightly in a little hot butter, then drain it, and put it into a saucepan with a pound and a half of mutton, a pound and a half of veal, and a pound of good rump-steak, all slightly browned. Add a pound of streaky bacon, and pour in as much boiling water as will cover the whole. Simmer gently for an hour, then add half a head of celery, a bunch of parsley, a dozen young onions, half a dozen carrots and turnips, and a pint of green peas, if they are in season, and boil gently until the vegetables are cooked enough. Salt and pepper must be added as required, and a small clove of garlic, if the flavour is liked. It is better to take out the bacon before the meat is served. Time, two hours. Probable cost, 7s. Sufficient for twelve persons.
A large-format boiled dinner: roughly six pounds of meat plus a whole chicken in one pot, meant to yield both broth and a platter. Scale it down by half unless you are actually feeding a dozen.
- Pot sizeThe full quantity needs a 12-quart stockpot or larger to hold the meats with water over them, and room for the vegetables later. A standard 6-quart Dutch oven will take half the recipe at most.
- Pull the chicken earlyA whole chicken is done in about 50-60 minutes of gentle simmering, well before the mutton and veal. Lift it out when the thigh reaches 175F, keep it covered and warm, and return it to the platter at serving. Left in for the full two hours it will shred and go dry.
- Cuts, translatedMutton means an older sheep and is now hard to find; lamb shoulder or leg on the bone is the usual substitute. Veal should be shoulder or breast, not a lean cutlet. Rump steak is the British cut from the top of the hip, roughly what an American butcher sells as bottom round or rump roast.
- Streaky baconThat is British belly (side) bacon, unsmoked or lightly smoked, in one piece rather than sliced. Salt pork or pancetta in a slab works. Modern bacon is often cured more sweetly than Victorian bacon, though older bacon was frequently the saltier of the two, so hold back added salt until the end and follow the instruction to remove it before serving.
- Simmer, do not boilThe instruction to boil gently once the vegetables go in should be read as a bare simmer throughout. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat and clouds the broth, which is half the point of the dish. Skim the grey scum in the first fifteen minutes and the fat before serving.
- Vegetable timingHalf a dozen carrots and turnips means whole roots, so cut them into large chunks and give them 25-30 minutes. Celery and onions want the same. A pint of green peas goes in for the last five minutes only; frozen peas need two.
- GarlicA single small clove in a pot this size is barely perceptible by modern standards. Two or three whole cloves, crushed, will register without making the dish taste garlicky.
- Serving and costThe recipe only directs that the bacon be lifted out before the meat is served; the meats can be sliced onto a warm platter with the vegetables around them, and the broth kept back for a first course if you like. The 7s. is a late-Victorian price for a dish sufficient for twelve, which works because it stretches tough cuts.
The English "olio" comes from the Spanish olla, the earthenware pot, and behind it stands olla podrida — literally "rotten pot," the long-simmered meat-and-vegetable dinner that survives today as Spanish cocido and Catalan escudella. English cooks borrowed the word in the seventeenth century, and by the time Cassell's was compiled it had drifted into a general term for any mixed stew of several meats. The same idea of one pot yielding a broth course and then a meat course underlies the French pot-au-feu and the Italian bollito misto; the technique is what makes a household of twelve affordable, since it turns mutton and veal shoulder into something presentable. It is generally said that the figurative English "olio," meaning a miscellany or a variety programme, descends from exactly this dish.