Irish Stew
Use the back ribs or neck of mutton, the fleshy part of which must be cut into cutlets. Flatten these pieces of meat with a roller, and dip them in a composition of pepper, salt, and flour. Peel potatoes and slice them to the extent of 2 pounds of potatoes for every pound of meat. Melt a little suet or dripping in the soup pot, place a layer of potatoes in the bottom, dust well with pepper and salt, then add a layer of meat, sprinkled with chopped onions. Proceed until the dish is nearly full, fill up with gravy if you have it, if not, water will do; finish off with a treble row of potatoes on top. Let it all stew slowly for about three hours, taking care to keep the lid so tight that none of the virtue could escape. Shake the pot occasionally with force, to prevent burning. It should be served as hot as possible. It is both a savory and inexpensive dish for cold weather.
A layered stew rather than a stirred one, and the layering is the whole point. Everything depends on a tight lid and heat low enough that the potatoes on the bottom melt into sauce instead of scorching.
- The hinge: heat and lidOn a modern gas or induction burner the lowest setting is still often too hot for three hours of unattended contact with the pot base. Use a heavy Dutch oven with a well-fitting lid, or transfer the covered pot to a 300F oven, which gives the same slow, sealed cooking without the shaking.
- Cut of muttonBack ribs and neck of mutton are hard to find; lamb neck, shoulder chops or bone-in shoulder cut into thick pieces behave the same way and carry the collagen the dish needs. Boneless leg is too lean and will go dry.
- "Cutlets" and the rollerCutlets here means thick slices off the bone or across the neck, not thin escalopes. Flattening with a rolling pin is optional with lamb, which is more tender than the mutton the writer had in mind.
- ProportionsTwo pounds of potatoes to one of meat is a genuine ratio, not a guess, and it is what makes the gravy. A mealy, starchy potato such as russet or Maris Piper breaks down and thickens; waxy potatoes stay in slices and leave the liquid thin.
- Suet or drippingBeef suet or bacon dripping both work. Any neutral oil or butter will do, though the pot only needs a film to keep the first potato layer from sticking.
- Liquid levelThe recipe says to fill up with gravy, or water if you have no gravy. How far up is not specified; layered stews of this kind generally need only enough liquid to come partway up the layers, since the potatoes and meat release a good deal. Lamb or beef stock gives more depth than water.
- Shaking the potThe recipe says to shake the pot occasionally, and with force, to prevent burning; shaking rather than stirring also leaves the layers intact. Sliding the pot back and forth once or twice an hour is enough; in the oven it matters less.
- YieldMade with about 2 lb of lamb and 4 lb of potatoes, this feeds six generously. It reheats well and the potatoes thicken further overnight.
Irish stew in its plainest early form is close to this: mutton, potatoes, onions and water, layered in a single pot and left over a low fire, with no browning and no thickening beyond what the potatoes give up. Mutton was largely the meat of sheep kept for wool and milk rather than for the table, and the neck and ribs were among the cheaper ends, which is why the dish appears in nineteenth-century household books as an economy recipe for cold weather. Carrots, barley and stock are generally regarded as later additions, and cooks have argued about them for a long time. The warning to keep the lid tight so that "none of the virtue could escape" reflects a period way of thinking about the goodness of meat residing in its juices and steam; the practical effect, keeping the pot sealed so the potatoes steam rather than dry out, is sound whatever the reasoning.