China Chilo
Simmer together for half an hour 2 tablespoonfuls of butter, ½ can of drained peas, a small blade of mace, 1 pint of gravy, and salt and pepper to season. Remove the mace, add i pint of diced cold mutton and I head of lettuce torn in shreds, and simmer for fifteen minutes longer.
Serve with a border of freshly boiled rice.
A leftovers dish: cold roast mutton reheated in gravy with peas and lettuce, ringed with rice. The whole thing hinges on the meat being already cooked, so the second simmer is about heating through and marrying flavours, not tenderising.
- "1 pint of diced cold mutton"Meat measured by volume, common in cookbooks of this period. A pint of small dice is on the order of three-quarters of a pound to a pound of cooked meat, or the useful remains of a shoulder or leg.
- Gravy means stockA pint of the brown meat gravy left from the roast, or well-reduced lamb or beef stock. Thin canned broth will taste watery here; the dish has no thickening beyond what the gravy carries.
- A blade of maceOne dried strip of the aril around a nutmeg, fished out before the meat goes in. If only ground mace is at hand, a scant pinch, since it will not be removable.
- Half a can of peasRoughly a cup of drained peas. Canned peas are already fully soft and will collapse over the full 45 minutes of simmering; frozen peas added in the last five minutes hold their shape better.
- The lettuceA firm head, romaine or iceberg, shredded. It is a vegetable here rather than a salad, and fifteen minutes reduces it almost to a sauce.
- Mutton and its substitutesMutton is mature sheep, generally reckoned over a year old (some authorities say two), strong-flavoured and rarely sold in the US. Cold roast lamb works, and is milder; the mace and gravy do most of the seasoning either way.
- Border of riceLong-grain rice, boiled and drained, pressed into a ring mould or simply spooned around the rim of a hot platter with the meat in the centre. About a cup to a cup and a half of raw rice serves four.
- YieldFour modest servings, or three generous ones. Season at the end, as reduced gravy can carry more salt than expected.
China chilo appears in English cookery books from the early nineteenth century onward, Maria Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery among the best known, usually as minced mutton stewed with peas, lettuce, onion and a warm spice, served inside a wall of rice. The name is generally taken as a piece of Regency exoticism rather than any real connection to China: rice borders, mace and ginger were enough to make a dish sound Eastern to British diners at a time when curries and pilaus were entering the domestic repertoire. What survives in this version is the frugal core of it. The dish exists to use up the cold joint, and the canned peas here suggest a later revision of a Georgian formula, the kitchen garden replaced by the grocer's shelf.