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Lamb Left-Overs
LAMB can be used in nearly every recipe given for beef. It is especially good for croquettes and makes a savory stew. Save every drop of gravy or liquid from the platter when setting a roast of lamb away. It requires all the enriching it can have and always plenty of seasoning.
Potatoes with Lamb Stuffing. 8 large baked potatoes, 1 cupful cold chopped lamb, 4 tablespoonfuls chopped ham, cupful thin white sauce, 2 tablespoonfuls cream, White 1 egg, Salt and pepper.
Bake 8 large, perfect potatoes.
While they are cooking, chop the lamb and ham, mix lightly together, add the seasonings, and moisten with white sauce. When the potatoes are soft, cut a thin slice from the end of each and scoop out the inside. Put it at once through a potato ricer and set away to keep warm. Fill the potato skins almost to the top with the meat mixture. Add to a cup of the mashed potato the cream and beaten white of the egg. Pepper and salt, and on the top of each potato put a spoonful, leaving it in a small, rocky mound. Bake till the top is a delicate brown. Serve the potatoes piled on their ends in a shallow dish, with a plentiful garnish of parsley.
Mound of Lamb with Peas. 2 cupfuls cold chopped lamb, 1 small onion, 1 cupful cold potatoes, Pepper and salt, 3 tablespoonfuls stock, cupful buttered crumbs, 1 cupful green peas.
Mix lightly with a fork the chopped meat, potato, onion, and seasonings.
Heap it in a mound in the middle of a shallow baking dish. Cover with buttered crumbs and bake till brown.
When ready to serve, pour around it a cup of green peas drained and seasoned.
Lamb-and-Rice Croquettes. 2 cupfuls chopped lamb, 1 cupful cold rice, 1 tablespoonful lemon juice, 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley.
Pepper and salt, 1 cupful white sauce.
Mix the lamb and rice with the seasonings and stir into a hot, thick, white sauce. Cool. Roll into coneshaped croquettes. Flour, egg, and crumb. Fry in deep fat. Garnish with parsley.
Lamb in Savory Stew. 1½ cupfuls cold lamb, 4 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 tablespoonful flour, onion, 1 cupful gravy or brown stock, 2 cucumber pickles, Pepper, salt, cayenne.
Into a granite saucepan put the butter, onion, and flour, and rub to a paste. When it grows light brown, add the gravy or stock, salt and pepper, and allow to simmer for two minutes. Cut the pickles in small pieces, add to the sauce and the lamb cut in neat slices. Let it heat through, then serve in a deep platter surrounded by a ring of hot boiled rice or mashed potatoes.
Roast Breast of Veal.
Four made-over dishes built on cooked lamb, all of them assuming a cook with a bowl of white sauce and a jar of drippings on hand. The original printing has lost several fractions, so read the ingredient lists with that in mind.
- Missing fractionsThe typesetting appears to have dropped fractional numerals: "cupful thin white sauce," "cupful buttered crumbs" and the bare "onion" in the stew list most likely each carried a fraction. The figures cannot be recovered from the page, but about ½ cup thin white sauce for the potatoes, ½ cup crumbs on the mound and half a small onion in the stew will work.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no temperatures. As a modern equivalent, around 400F will brown the tops of the stuffed potatoes and the lamb mound in roughly 15-20 minutes; bake the potatoes themselves at about 425F for an hour or so before scooping.
- Reheat properlyAll four dishes reheat already-cooked meat that has been sitting in the cold. Bring every one of them through to 165F at the center rather than merely warm — the stew instruction "let it heat through" is doing a lot of work in one phrase.
- Granite saucepanGranite ware is enamelled metal. The recipe does not say why it is specified, but an unreactive pan is sensible with acidic pickles: any stainless or enamelled pan does the same, and bare cast iron or aluminium is best avoided.
- "Flour, egg, and crumb"The standard three-stage breading: dust the shaped croquette in flour, roll in beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water, then in fine dry crumbs. Chill the coated cones 30 minutes before frying at 375F, or they will burst in the fat.
- Cucumber picklesNot sweet pickles. The period sense is a sour brined cucumber — dill or a cornichon — which is what balances the butter-and-flour roux base of the savory stew.
- Potato ricer, and speedRice the scooped potato while it is hot and keep it hot; cooled potato beaten with cream and egg white turns gluey. The "small, rocky mound" is deliberate, as the peaks are what brown.
- YieldsThe stuffed potatoes serve four to eight depending on whether they are a main dish or a side. The croquette mixture makes about eight cones; the mound and the stew each serve three to four.
Chapters of "left-overs" like this one are common in American household manuals from the 1890s through the 1910s, when the domestic-science movement recast thrift as a technical skill rather than a shame, though such chapters appear well before that period too. Domestic cold storage made it possible to keep Sunday's roast into the week, and writers responded with entire systems for disguising it: chopped and bound with white sauce, shaped, crumbed, and browned so the second appearance looked nothing like the first. The advice to save "every drop of gravy or liquid from the platter" reflects a real characteristic of cold lamb, whose fat congeals unpleasantly once cold, and the insistence on "plenty of seasoning" acknowledges what any cook knows. Croquettes in particular were the era's universal solvent for scraps.