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York Hot Pot
12 oysters. 1 heaping tablespoonful (1 oz.) butter or dripping. 2 lbs. mutton neck 2 lbs. potatoes 3 onions 3 mutton kidneys I2 oysters 1 pint (2 cups) stock I heaping tablespoonful (I oz.) butter or dripping 1 teaspoonful curry powder Salt and pepper to taste Cut the meat into neat cutlets. Peel the potatoes, and cut six or eight of them in halves, slicing the rest thickly. Peel and slice the onions thinly. Wash the mushrooms and oysters. Skin and halve the kidneys. Put all these in layers in a casserole. The last one should be of potatoes cut in halves. Season well, put in the butter, and pour in the stock; put the lid on, and cook gently in a slow oven for two and a half hours.
For the last half hour remove the lid, so that the potatoes may brown nicely. Serve in the casserole.
A layered oven stew of the Lancashire hotpot family, cooked and served in the same lidded dish. Two details in the original need attention before you start: the ingredient list omits the mushrooms that the method calls for, and the oysters are put in at the beginning of a two-and-a-half-hour bake.
- The missing mushroomsThe method says to wash the mushrooms, but they never appear in the list. Roughly 4 oz of button or chestnut mushrooms, sliced, fits the scale of the dish and can go in with the onions.
- OystersTwelve oysters layered in at the start will be leathery long before the meat is done. Oysters were cheap in this period and often used to stretch and season meat dishes rather than for their own texture. If you want them to taste of anything, slip them under the top layer of potatoes for the final half hour.
- Slow ovenThe book gives no temperature; a slow oven is conventionally taken as somewhere around 300-325F. At that sort of heat two and a half hours suits neck of mutton, a hard-working cut full of connective tissue that wants long, gentle heat.
- Mutton neckTrue mutton is sheep over two years old and is now a specialist butcher's item. Lamb neck fillet or bone-in neck chops work in its place, though the flavour is milder and the meat may be tender closer to the two-hour mark.
- KidneysSkin means removing the thin membrane; halve them and cut out the pale core of gristle as well, which the original takes for granted. A soak in cold salted water for twenty minutes takes the edge off the smell.
- The stockThe gloss of a pint as 2 cups suggests an American measure rather than the 20 oz imperial pint, though it may simply be a rough editorial conversion. Either way it should come roughly to the top of the meat and onion layers, not cover the halved potatoes on top, or they will not brown.
- Browning the topRemoving the lid for the last half hour is the point of the halved potatoes. Brush them with a little extra dripping when you take the lid off if they look dry, and raise the heat to 400F if they are still pale after twenty minutes.
- YieldTwo pounds of meat with two pounds of potatoes serves four generously or six with bread. Nothing else is needed alongside it beyond a green vegetable.
- Curry powderA single teaspoon in a dish this size is seasoning, not heat. Commercial curry powders of this period were generally mild and turmeric-heavy, so a modern hot blend will read quite differently; choose a mild one.
The hotpot is a northern English oven dish built on the same logic everywhere it appears: cheap sheep meat, onions, and a lid of sliced potato that browns into a crust once the cover comes off. Lancashire has the better-known claim, and Yorkshire versions also appear in Victorian and Edwardian cookery writing. Kidneys and oysters are not exclusive to them -- printed Lancashire hotpot recipes of the period often include both. The oysters are the period marker: before the beds were fished out and prices climbed, oysters were cheap enough to be everyday food and were used to stretch and season beef and mutton dishes rather than served as a luxury. The recipe also reflects a wider interest in casserole cookery in the early twentieth century, when flameproof earthenware and enamelled iron were being marketed to households with less domestic help; the appeal was one vessel, little attention, and the dish carried straight to the table, which is what the final instruction here describes.