Mutton Hash
Cut the meat up fine, putting the bones on to stew in water; then take out the bones and put in the hash, with pepper, salt and gravy left from the day before.
Let these stew at least half an hour. Put in one large tablespoonful browned flour. Add- 6 tablespoonfuls red wine. 1 tablespoonful walnut catsup. 1 tablespoonful tomato catsup. A lump of butter rolled in a little flour. If a small dish, proportion the seasoning.
Beef, goose, and duck has can be made the same way.-Mrs. R.
A leftover-joint dish: the bones make a quick stock while yesterday's gravy and a few sharp condiments carry the flavour. The hinge is that the meat is already cooked, so the half-hour of stewing is for the bone liquor and the sauce, not for tenderising.
- What the meat isThis assumes the remains of a roast leg or shoulder of mutton from the day before, along with its cold gravy. Lamb works identically; mutton (sheep over about two years) is sold mainly by halal and specialist butchers now and is stronger and fattier.
- Cut fine, not minced"Cut the meat up fine" means small dice by knife. Ground or food-processed meat turns to paste in a wet stew and loses the texture the dish depends on.
- The bone stockCover the bones with cold water and simmer while you prepare everything else, 30-45 minutes; strain before the meat goes in. Two cups of liquid is about right for a pound of cooked meat, added gradually so the hash stays thick rather than soupy.
- Browned flourA pantry staple of the period: plain flour toasted dry in a skillet or a slow oven until nut-brown, kept in a jar. It thickens less than raw flour, which is why the butter-and-flour lump at the end also helps bind. Toast a few tablespoons in a dry skillet over moderate heat, stirring constantly, until nut-brown, if you have none by you.
- Walnut catsupNot a tomato product. It is a thin, dark, salty sauce made from green walnuts, vinegar and spice, and it is still sold by British specialist grocers. Worcestershire sauce or a mushroom ketchup is the nearest ordinary substitute, used in the same tablespoon quantity.
- Red wineSix tablespoons is a little over a third of a cup. Any dry red will do; the period cook might have reached for claret or a sweeter port-style wine, and a splash of the latter suits mutton well.
- Stewing timeHalf an hour at a bare simmer is the minimum given and is sound, since the point is to reduce the wine's rawness and marry the gravy. Do not boil hard, or the reheated meat goes dry and stringy.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié: roughly equal parts soft butter and flour worked together, dropped in at the end and stirred until the sauce gloss over. Add it off a hard boil, in pieces, and stop when the sauce coats a spoon.
- YieldNo quantity is given because it depends on what was left of the joint. A pound of cooked meat with the seasonings as written serves three or four over toast, rice or mashed potato; the note to "proportion the seasoning" for a small dish means scaling the wine and catsups down with the meat.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of recipes like this one: signed with an initial, assuming a household that roasted a large joint on Sunday and expected to eat it in some other form on Monday. Hash of this kind is a direct descendant of English kitchen practice, where the second-day treatment of a cold roast was a recognised branch of cookery rather than an afterthought, and the bones went into the pot as a matter of course. The condiment list is suggestive rather than precise, since walnut, mushroom and tomato catsups coexisted for decades: walnut catsup and mushroom catsup were the older, savoury ketchups, and tomato catsup here stands beside rather than in place of them, at a point when the tomato version was ascendant but not yet the only thing the word meant. The closing line — beef, goose and duck done the same way — is characteristic of the book, which treats a method as more useful than a single dish.