Irish Stew
Pare 4 large apples, 2 potatoes, and 2 goodsized onions; cut them into small pieces. Add 1 tablespoonful of finely chopped parsley, 1 pint of cold cooked meat cut in small pieces, 1 teaspoonful of salt, and a heavy seasoning of pepper. Put this into a saucepan, add 1 pint of stock; cover with a plain biscuit crust; put the lid on the saucepan and simmer gently for thirty minutes.
This is a leftovers dish under a steamed dumpling lid, not the mutton-and-potato stew the name usually promises. The crust is the part that needs attention.
- The hinge: keep the lid onThe "biscuit crust" cooks by trapped steam, so the pan lid must stay in place for the full thirty minutes. Lifting it drops the temperature and gives you a pale, sodden top.
- "Plain biscuit crust"The book gives no dough recipe. In American usage of the period this most likely means a plain baking-powder dough; a workable modern version is roughly 2 cups flour, 2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt, 4 tbsp fat rubbed in, and enough milk or water to bind. Roll it to the width of the pan and lay it on top of the liquid; it will rise into a soft-bottomed dumpling.
- A pint of meatMeasured by volume, not weight: a pint of diced cooked meat is about 1 lb. Any cold roast works, but lamb or mutton is what makes it read as Irish stew rather than hash.
- A pint of stockTwo cups. Use it hot rather than cold so the crust starts steaming immediately, and keep it just below the level of the crust so the underside poaches rather than floats.
- The applesFour large apples to two potatoes is a striking ratio; the apple breaks down and thickens the gravy with a sweet-tart edge. A firm apple such as Granny Smith holds its shape better than a soft eating apple, which can go to mush in half an hour.
- Cut size mattersSince the whole thing gets only thirty minutes at a gentle simmer, the potato and onion must be genuinely small — 1/2-inch dice at most — or they will still be firm when the crust is done.
- Reheating leftoversThe meat goes in already cooked, so bring the stew to a proper simmer and hold it there; the pan should be bubbling steadily under the crust, not merely warm.
- YieldProbably four or more, depending on appetite. Spoon it out crust and all, in the manner of a pot pie, and taste the gravy again before serving.
The name is doing a lot of work here. Irish stew proper is a long-simmered dish of mutton, potato and onion, associated with the Irish cottage kitchen where a single pot over the fire had to serve for everything; the potato and the cheap cuts of sheep are the whole point of it. What this recipe actually offers is an economy pudding of the sort that filled British and American thrift cookery -- cold roast meat from a previous meal, stretched with apple and root vegetables and capped with a steamed flour crust so that the pan yields both the filling and the starch in one operation. The apple is worth noting: fruit cooked with meat was a familiar way to bulk out a small quantity of protein and give the gravy body without butter or a roux.