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Some Kitchen Kinks: Remove
Remove the bones and all the fat from the mutton, cut the meat into small pieces and put it into a stewpan with the water, chopped vegetables, barley, and all the seasoning excepting the parsley. It will be found convenient to tie the bones in a piece of thin white cloth before adding them to the other ingredients.
Bring the stew to a boil, quickly skim it and allow it to simmer for three hours, thicken with the flour, and add the chopped parsley.
Stuffed Heart.
Wash the heart thoroughly inside and out, stuff with the following mixture, and sew up the opening:
One cup broken bread dipped in fat and browned in the oven, 1 chopped onion, and salt and pepper to taste.
This page is a fragment: the ingredient list for the mutton broth has been lost, and the stuffed heart breaks off before it is cooked. What survives is still workable if you treat it as method rather than formula.
- The missing quantitiesThe original ingredient list is not on this page, so no amounts are given for water, vegetables, barley or flour. For a stew of this type, roughly 2 lb boned mutton to 2 quarts water, a cup of diced root vegetables, and 1/2 cup pearl barley is in the right proportion; thicken at the end with 2 tablespoons flour slaked in cold water.
- The bones in clothThis is the instruction worth keeping. Tying the bones in cheesecloth lets them give up gelatin and marrow for the full three hours and then be lifted out whole, with no splinters left in the broth.
- MuttonMutton means sheep generally over a year old, often older; strongly flavoured and sinewy. Many butchers now sell only lamb; shoulder or neck is the right cut either way, and lamb will be tender well before three hours, so check it at ninety minutes and pull the meat if it is already falling apart.
- Skim quicklyThe scum rises in the first few minutes at a rolling boil and then breaks up and disperses if left. Skim as soon as it appears, then drop the heat so the surface barely trembles.
- BarleyPearl barley is what is meant. It will absorb a great deal of liquid over three hours, so expect to add water; hulled barley takes longer still and gives a chewier grain.
- Thicken with the flourFlour dropped dry into hot broth will lump. Mix it to a thin cream with cold water or stir it into a little softened butter first, then whisk it in and give the pot ten minutes' simmer to cook out the raw taste.
- The heart is unfinishedThe recipe stops at sewing up the opening, and does not say whose heart is meant. Heart is dense muscle and needs long moist cooking; modern practice is to braise it covered in liquid at around 325F for two to three hours, until a skewer goes in easily. Follow a current recipe for the cooking stage rather than guessing at it.
- Preparing the heartWashing inside and out is not quite enough. Trim the hard white sinew, valve remnants and surface fat from the chambers before stuffing, or they stay rubbery however long it cooks.
- YieldOn the quantities suggested above, the broth serves four to six; a stuffed heart, sliced across the grain, will serve a similar number depending on the size of the animal it came from.
Boned mutton, barley and root vegetables simmered for hours is the outline of Scotch broth, a dish that travelled into American and English household manuals through the nineteenth century as a model of thrift: the bones carry the flavour, the barley carries the body, and a small amount of tough meat feeds a family. The stuffed heart alongside it belongs to the same economy. Heart, along with liver, tripe and tongue, appeared routinely in books of this period because a household that bought or slaughtered a whole animal had to use all of it, and heart is lean, cheap and takes stuffing well. Both dishes reflect the assumption behind a book like this one, that the reader is managing a household budget rather than choosing a cut for pleasure, and that nothing edible leaves the kitchen unused.