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Mutton à La Verona
2lbs. neck mutton 2 turnips carrots 2 onions 12 preserved cherries 1 wineglassful sherry wine 1 tablespoonful mushroom ketchup 1 pint (2 cups) stock I heaping tablespoonful (I 4 tomatoes oz.) flour I heaping tablespoonful (I Salt and pepper oz.) butter
The text here has come through as a garbled ingredient list — the two columns of the original have been run together and the method has dropped out entirely. What survives is enough to reconstruct a standard braise: brown the floured mutton in the butter, sweat the root vegetables, add stock, sherry and ketchup, and cook it slowly in a covered casserole, with the cherries added near the end.
- Read the column breakThe line "I heaping tablespoonful (I 4 tomatoes oz.) flour" is two entries collided: 4 tomatoes, and 1 heaping tablespoonful (1 oz.) flour. The same happens with the butter and the salt and pepper. Turnips and onions are 2 each; the quantity for the carrots has dropped out of the line, and was most likely 2 as well.
- Casserole means the potWhere books of this period call for a casserole they mean a lidded fireproof earthenware or enamelled vessel that goes on the hob and then into the oven, not a baked dish in the American sense; a heavy Dutch oven is the direct equivalent. Note that the word does not occur in the surviving text of this recipe.
- WineglassfulRoughly 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Period wineglasses were far smaller than modern stemware; do not read it as a tumbler.
- Neck muttonMutton is sheep over a year old, stronger and leaner than lamb and now sold mainly by specialist butchers. Lamb neck or neck fillet substitutes directly, but will be milder and will cook faster.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquor, nothing like tomato ketchup. It is still made commercially; a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce or a dash of soy plus a little mushroom soaking liquid stands in for the same savoury-salt function.
- Preserved cherriesCherries put up in syrup or brandy, not the bleached and dyed cocktail cherry. Morello or amarena cherries in syrup are the closest thing on a modern shelf, and they belong in only for the last few minutes so they hold their shape.
- Oven and time"Slow oven" in period usage is generally taken as roughly 300-325F, though this recipe as it survives names no oven at all. Two pounds of neck would want something like two to two and a half hours covered, until the meat pulls from the bone; lamb neck would be done nearer ninety minutes.
- YieldTwo pounds of bone-in neck with a pint of stock and the vegetables serves four.
Casserole cookery is often said to have had a vogue in Britain and America in the early years of the twentieth century, when fireproof earthenware became more widely available and small books appeared to explain what to do with it. The appeal was economy: a covered pot and a slow oven turn cheap, sinewy cuts such as neck of mutton into something worth serving, and the same vessel goes to the table. The Verona name may point to the cherries rather than to any documented Veronese dish — northern Italy is generally associated with preserved sour cherries, and cookbook writers of the period sometimes attached Italian and French place names to braises to signal a particular garnish. Sweet fruit with mutton was in any case an old British habit, of a piece with redcurrant jelly, and the sherry and mushroom ketchup here are a familiar late-Victorian pair for deepening a brown sauce.