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Lamb and Mutton
Mutton Stew (Irish recipe). 1½ pounds neck mutton, 2 quarts potatoes, 4 onions, 2 cupfuls boiling water, Pepper and salt. 1 Cut the mutton in pieces, and put in saucepan with the onions cut in rings, also the hot water and salt.
Let it boil, then simmer gently for two hours. Parboil the potatoes, cut them in halves, put in the saucepan with the meat, about half an hour before it is done. In serving, put the potatoes round the dish, with the meat and onions in the center, and pour the gravy over.
Roast Lamb.
Wipe the meat with a damp towel, place in a baking pan, dredge with pepper, salt, and flour. Add a cupful boiling water and a teaspoonful salt to the pan. Baste every ten minutes, and bake fifteen minutes to the pound in a hot oven. When done set the meat on a platter, and serve with mint sauce and green peas.
Boiled Leg of Lamb.
Choose a hind leg, put into a kettle, and cover with boiling water. Set over the fire, let come to a boil, pour in a pint cold water and simmer gently until done. Take the meat up on a hot dish, and serve with caper sauce.
Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb.
Bone a shoulder of lamb, leave the knuckle, and fill the cavity with rich bread stuffing; tie neatly in shape and wrap in a buttered paper. Lay in a deep pan with 4 tablespoonfuls butter, a sliced carrot and turnip, an onion stuck with cloves, and a bunch sweet herbs. Pour on sufficient stock to cover the bottom of the pan. Set over a slow fire and simmer gently; baste every ten minutes. When nearly done, lift from the pan, remove the paper; brush the meat with melted glaze and set in the oven to brown.
Take up the shoulder on a heated dish. Strain the gravy, and pour around it. Garnish with purée of green peas, and serve with maître d'hôtel sauce. - ELIZA PARKER.
Pressed Lamb.
Put a shoulder of lamb on to boil, with water to cover; when tender, season with salt and pepper. Boil until tender, when the juice will be nearly boiled out. Chop the meat, and season. Put it in a bowl with a plate on top and press out all the juice; set in a cool place to harden.
Slice thin when serving. Soup can be made of the broth.
Broiled Breast of Lamb.
Trim a breast of lamb and put it in a saucepan, cover with stock, add a bunch sweet herbs, a slice onion, a piece mace, and 2 or 3 cloves; simmer gently until tender. Take up, dredge with salt and pepper, brush over with beaten egg and grated cracker, and broil over a clear fire until brown on both sides. Take up on a heated dish, pour over a little melted butter and garnish with asparagus tips.
Imitation Barbecue of Mutton.
Remove the skin from a leg of mutton, sprinkle with salt, and dredge with flour. Place in the pan and MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK roast. Allow the meat twenty minutes to the pound. One hour before serving, prepare the following mixture: cupful Worcestershire Sauce, cupful tomato catsup, cupful vinegar, teaspoonful pepper, 2 teaspoonfuls mustard.
Stick the meat all over with a sharp-pointed knife, pull the cuts open and fill with this hot mixture.
Baste with the liquor which gathers in the pan, and pour it over the meat before sending it to the table.
Army Stew. 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley, 2 pounds forequarter lamb, 1 teaspoonful pepper, 1 tablespoonful salt, 4 onions, 2 turnips, 2 carrots, 4 potatoes, cupful milk, 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, 1 egg, 2 cupfuls flour.
Cut lamb in pieces, place in a saucepan, cover with boiling water, cook two minutes, remove, drain and plunge into cold water, drain and return the meat to the saucepan. Cover again with boiling water, add salt, pepper, and onions, boil an hour and a half, add turnips, peeled and cut into quarters, carrots and potatoes, cut into quarters; boil till done. Ten minutes before serving, mix flour with baking powder, egg and milk, cut with teaspoonful small portions from the mixture and drop them in the stew; cover, and cook five minutes; then remove the saucepan to side of stove, where it stops boiling, otherwise the dumplings will become heavy; add parsley, and serve.
Haricot Mutton (English recipe) 1½ pounds neck mutton. 1 onion, carrot 1 turnip, 4 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, Pepper and salt to taste, 2 cupfuls hot water.
Divide the meat into small joints, and cut the vegetables in small square pieces. Put the butter in a saucepan, add the meat, and fry brown with the / onions. Pour off the fat, add the vegetables, flour, water, and a little salt. Let it boil; then simmer gently from one and a half to two hours. In serving, put the meat on a hot dish, pile the vegetables on top, and pour the gravy round about.
Nine dishes built around a meat that has largely vanished from American butcher counters. Most of the work here is long, gentle simmering, and the main adjustments are unit conversions, oven numbers, and the fact that the printed fractions have dropped out of several ingredient lists.
- Mutton itselfMutton is sheep over two years old — stronger in flavor, tougher, and slower to cook than lamb. If you cannot find it, lamb neck or shoulder works in the stews but will be tender in about half the stated time; check at the one-hour mark rather than trusting the two hours.
- Missing fractionsThe Imitation Barbecue mixture reads "cupful Worcestershire Sauce, cupful tomato catsup, cupful vinegar" — the fractions have been lost in printing. Three full cups of that mixture on one leg of mutton is implausible; a quarter cup of each is the proportion the dish implies, but the original is genuinely ambiguous here.
- Oven temperaturesA "hot oven" for the roast lamb is roughly 425-450F. Fifteen minutes to the pound at that heat gives a leg that is pink at the center; pull it at 130-135F internal for medium-rare, since the recipe judges doneness by the clock alone. The Imitation Barbecue gives no oven heat, but its twenty minutes to the pound will land closer to medium.
- "2 quarts potatoes"A dry-volume measure of peeled, cut potatoes: roughly 2½ to 3 pounds. Irish stew is deliberately potato-heavy, so err toward more.
- Grated crackerPlain unsalted soda or water crackers, grated to crumbs. Modern saltines crushed fine are the nearest thing; reduce added salt accordingly.
- Buttered paper and glazeThe 'buttered paper' wrapping the stuffed shoulder would have been plain kitchen paper; buttered parchment is the nearest modern equivalent, buttered side against the meat. "Melted glaze" is meat glaze — stock reduced to a syrup — brushed on for shine before the final browning; demi-glace or heavily reduced stock does the same job.
- The dumplings in Army StewThe hinge is the last line: once the dumplings have steamed five minutes under a lid, take the pot off the boil. Continued hard boiling waterlogs and toughens them. Calumet was simply a brand of double-acting baking powder; use any.
- Blanching the lambThe two-minute boil, cold plunge, and fresh water in Army Stew is there to throw off scum and give a clear broth. It is optional by modern practice — skimming does the same — but it does produce a noticeably cleaner-tasting stew.
- Pressed lamb"Set in a cool place to harden" means the refrigerator, not a pantry. Weight it, chill it thoroughly, and treat it as you would any cooked pressed meat: three or four days at most, sliced cold.
- YieldsEach stew as written feeds four to six. The roasts and the boiled leg depend on the joint, but a whole leg of lamb serves six to eight.
These recipes sit at the moment when American cooks were losing mutton. Through the nineteenth century sheep were kept as much for wool as for meat, and older animals came to table routinely; by the time this book was compiled, lamb and cheap beef were pushing mutton to the margins — note the parenthetical "Irish recipe" and "English recipe" here. Irish stew in its plainest form is mutton, onion and potato in water, with the potatoes doing the thickening; the version printed here is close to that austere original. Haricot mutton, despite the name, contains no beans: the word is generally traced to the Old French harigoter, to cut up, and the dish is defined by meat and root vegetables cut into small squares rather than by any legume. "Imitation Barbecue" is a telling entry too — a Northern oven roast dressed with Worcestershire, catsup and vinegar in place of a pit, and evidence that bottled sauces had by then become the shorthand for a whole regional style.