Chinese Mutton
Dice fine 1 pint of cold mutton. Add I head of lettuce torn in shreds, I can of peas drained, 1 teaspoonful of onion juice, salt and pepper, 1 tablespoonful of butter and 1½ cupfuls of broth or water. Simmer gently for half an hour, seasoning to taste. Serve with a border of hot boiled rice.
A leftovers dish built on cold roast mutton, thin on seasoning by modern standards and generous with simmering time. Two adjustments do most of the work: hold the peas back, and season assertively.
- A pint of diced meatMeat here is measured by volume, not weight: 1 pint of fine dice is roughly 2 cups, or about 10-12 oz of cooked mutton off the bone. Lamb shoulder or leg is the easiest substitute if mutton is not available, though it will taste milder and sweeter.
- The peas are the hingeCanned peas are fully cooked in the tin. Half an hour of simmering reduces them to grey paste. Add them in the last three or four minutes, or use frozen peas, which need about the same.
- Simmer the meat, not the saladThe thirty minutes is for the mutton to give up flavour to the broth and lose its refrigerator firmness. The shredded lettuce needs five minutes at most; beyond that it goes slimy and khaki. Romaine or iceberg holds up better than butterhead.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut: a grated onion pressed through a sieve or squeezed in muslin. A small onion will usually yield a teaspoonful and often rather more. Half a small onion, grated and added whole, is simpler and no worse.
- Season harder than writtenSalt, pepper and butter alone will read flat to a modern palate. The dish takes well to a bay leaf in the broth, a spoonful of soy, or a squeeze of lemon at the end without straying from its character.
- Broth over waterWith 1½ cups of liquid and no thickening, water gives you damp mutton in a puddle. Use a real stock, and if it stays thin, lift the meat out and reduce the liquid for a few minutes before returning it.
- Yield and the rice borderServes three to four. The border is presentation: press hot boiled rice into a ring around the edge of a warmed platter and spoon the mutton into the centre. About 1 cup of raw long-grain rice is enough for four.
Dishes labelled "Chinese" in American and British cookbooks of this period rarely had much to do with Chinese cooking; the word tended to signal rice, a soy-adjacent savouriness, or simply the practice of stretching a small quantity of meat with vegetables, which chop suey houses had made familiar to urban diners by the turn of the twentieth century. What is genuinely at work here is the older economy of the cold-meat cookery chapter, a fixture of every thrift-minded household manual: Monday's dinner rebuilt from Sunday's joint, cut small so that a pint of mutton feeds four. Mutton itself was then the ordinary cheap red meat, the flesh of a mature sheep, stronger and coarser than lamb and correspondingly less expensive; its near-disappearance from English-speaking markets over the twentieth century is why recipes like this one now read as more exotic than they were meant to be. The canned peas may hint at the period too, though tinned goods were a premium item before they became a staple of low-budget kitchens.