Hotch Potch
During the summer season get lamb chops, which half fry. Cut up cabbage, lettuce, turnips, onions and any other vegetables, which boil, with seasoning of pepper, salt, etc; one hour before dinner, put in the lamb chops, with some green peas; boil the potatoes separately.
A loose summer stew of lamb and garden vegetables, written for a cook who already knew what a pot of soup should look like. The gaps are in quantities and liquid, both of which you supply.
- Scale itFor six servings, figure 6 to 8 small lamb shoulder or rib chops and about 3 quarts of water or light stock. The original gives neither quantities nor liquid, so both are the cook's guess.
- "Half fry" the chopsBrown them hard in a little fat, two to three minutes a side, and leave the interior pink. The point is the fond and the browned surface, not cooked-through meat; they finish in the pot. Deglaze the pan into the stew or you throw away the best of the flavour.
- The one-hour instructionAn hour is enough to finish the half-fried chops in the pot and let the bones flavour the broth. The peas do not need it. Add shelled peas in the last 8 to 10 minutes, frozen ones in the last 3, or they turn grey and mealy.
- Vegetable orderTurnips and onions want 25 to 30 minutes; cabbage wants 15 to 20; lettuce, which the period used as a stewing green, collapses in 5. Staggering them keeps the pot from becoming uniform mush.
- Lettuce in a stewNot an error. Romaine or another firm-ribbed head, shredded, was a standard summer pot herb. Do not use a soft butterhead or bagged salad leaf.
- Separate potatoesBoiling them apart keeps the broth clear rather than starchy and cloudy. Serve them alongside or drop them in at the last minute so they hold their shape.
- Seasoning"Pepper, salt, etc." leaves the rest to the cook; a bay leaf, a little mace or allspice, or parsley would all be in keeping. Salt after the meat has given up its juices, and taste again at the end.
- SkimHalf-fried lamb throws a good deal of fat and scum in the first twenty minutes. Skim it, or cool the pot and lift the fat cap before reheating.
Hotch potch (also hotchpot, hodgepodge) is the Scots and northern English name for a thick summer stew of young mutton or lamb with whatever the kitchen garden was producing — peas, turnips, lettuce, young cabbage. The word itself is old legal and culinary French, hochepot, from a verb meaning to shake or jostle, describing a pot whose contents are stirred together indiscriminately; the same root gives English the legal term hotchpot for property thrown into a common pool. Its appearance in an American housekeeping book is unremarkable: British regional cookery came over with the colonists and stayed, and a recipe keyed to "the summer season" and to lamb, peas and lettuce all arriving at once fits a household eating from its own garden rather than a market. The offhand style — no quantities, no water measured, just an order of operations — is typical of the contributed recipes in these compilations.