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Hashed Mutton
Cut cold mutton into very thin slices, and make a gravy by boiling the bones for two hours with a little onion, pepper and salt.
Strain this gravy and thicken it with a little flour, adding a small amount of tomato or mushroom gravy to flavor it, and a small piece of butter. When the gravy is of a proper consistency, put in the slices of mutton, and let it simmer slowly for ten minutes. Serve on a platter with parsley and sippets of bread.
Hashed Mutton.
Fry in a saucepan three small onions, and three small slices of bacon or ham, until they are brown; then add a little more than half a pint water, and thicken it with flour. Next strain it and add it to the meat with a little sauce; pepper and salt to the taste.
It will take about an hour to hash.
Two versions of the same leftover dish sit side by side here, a common habit in nineteenth-century manuals: the first builds a gravy from the bones, the second from fried onion and bacon. Both depend on one rule the text never states outright.
- The hinge: never boil the meatThe mutton is already cooked; the gravy is simply the vehicle. Ten minutes at a bare simmer is the maximum, and the pan should not bubble hard at any point or the thin slices turn grey and stringy.
- "About an hour to hash"The second version gives no breakdown of the hour. It most likely covers the whole operation — browning the onions and bacon, making and straining the sauce, and finishing with the meat — rather than an hour of the mutton in the pan.
- Half a pintAn American half-pint is 1 cup (240 ml); "a little more than half a pint" means roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups. If the book is following English measure, a half-pint is closer to 10 fl oz. Either reading works — thicken to a gravy consistency and judge by eye.
- Tomato or mushroom gravyProbably not gravy in the modern sense. The small quantity suggests the bottled storecupboard sauces of the period: mushroom ketchup, or a thin spiced tomato ketchup much sharper and less sweet than the modern condiment. A tablespoon of mushroom ketchup, or Worcestershire sauce at a pinch, gives the intended savoury lift.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, fried in butter or toasted, arranged around the edge of the platter to soak up gravy. Cut them from a firm white loaf and add them at the last moment so they stay crisp.
- MuttonTrue mutton — sheep over two years — is scarce outside halal and specialist butchers. Leftover roast lamb shoulder or leg behaves the same way, though the flavour is milder and needs the ketchup less.
- The bone stockTwo hours of simmering with onion, pepper and salt gives a light broth, not a rich one. Skim the fat off before thickening, or the finished gravy will be greasy on the plate.
- YieldDepends entirely on what is left of the joint; the recipe names no quantity of meat. Reckon 4 to 6 oz of sliced meat per person. On the half-pint-odd of liquid in the second version, a pound of mutton serving three or four is a reasonable guess.
Hashes of this kind were the backbone of the second-day table in households that roasted a large joint on Sunday, and cookbooks of the period treat them as a matter of thrift and skill rather than of invention — the mark of a good cook was that reheated mutton reached the table looking deliberate. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathers contributions from Virginia housewives, and two separate recipes for the same dish appear under one heading. The reliance on bottled mushroom and tomato ketchups is a period marker in itself; before commercial stock cubes, these concentrated sauces were how a cook put depth into a gravy made from bones and water. Mutton was then a far more ordinary meat in American kitchens than it is now, and its gradual disappearance from the market — in favour of younger, milder lamb — is one reason recipes like this one read as archaic today.