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Lamb Surprise
Edith E. Smith, East Orange, N. J.
Grease a casserole. Put into it two or three cups cooked rice, preferably hot. Grate a little cheese over it. Push the rice to the sides and place about 1½ cups diced cold shoulder of lamb in the cavity left in center of dish. Season lamb and mix with a slice or two of chopped bacon. Pour 1½ cups of tomatoes over all. Cover the top with buttered crumbs, bake in a hot oven until thoroughly heated and the crumbs are all browned.
A leftovers dish from a church-supper collection, written for a cook who already had Sunday's roast shoulder in the icebox. It comes together in minutes; the only real decisions are the bacon and the oven.
- The hinge: cook the bacon firstThe recipe has you mix raw chopped bacon into the meat, and the short bake called for here will not reliably render it — you get pale, flabby strips through the lamb. Fry it until the fat runs, then chop and fold it in, and use a spoonful of the drippings to season the meat.
- "A hot oven"425F. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so the heat is there to brown crumbs and bubble the tomato, not to cook anything through. Twenty to twenty-five minutes is usually enough.
- CasseroleIn a community cookbook of this period this means an ovenproof baking dish with sides — a 1½ to 2-quart dish is right. Not a modern shallow gratin pan; you need depth to bank the rice around the edge.
- Tomatoes"1½ cups of tomatoes" most likely means canned tomatoes with their juice, a common pantry item of the period. A 14.5 oz can, broken up, is a little more than the quantity called for. Fresh tomatoes will be too watery unless you seed and drain them.
- Cold shoulder of lambLeftover roast lamb of any cut works; shoulder is simply what a family would have had left over. About 8 oz diced. Season it properly — cold cooked lamb is bland, and apart from the bacon the dish gives it little but tomato. Salt, pepper, and a little thyme or rosemary.
- Buttered crumbsDry breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly a cup of crumbs to two tablespoons butter. Fresh soft crumbs carry more moisture and will brown less crisply.
- RiceTwo to three cups cooked is roughly three-quarters to one cup raw. Hot rice is specified because the whole dish is otherwise cold going into the oven; using it cold will lengthen the bake.
- YieldServes four as a luncheon dish, three if it is the only thing on the table.
Church and club cookbooks of this era ran heavily to economical reassemblies of Sunday's roast, given a cheerful name so nobody at the table had to say the word leftovers. "Surprise" was a common conceit: the meat is hidden in a well of rice and revealed only when the spoon goes in. The contributor's address, East Orange, New Jersey, is a reminder of how these books were compiled — congregations wrote to relatives and former members scattered across the country, so a Libertyville, Illinois volume could carry a recipe posted from suburban New Jersey. The combination of rice, tomato, cheese and a buttered crumb top belongs to the same American casserole tradition that produced scalloped everything, and depended on the canned tomato, cheap and increasingly available by the 1910s.