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Irish Stew No. 2
3 pounds potatoes 3 large Spanish onions 2 turnips 1 cauliflower 2 ounces butter 1 ounce pearl barley 1 1/2 pints water Pepper and salt to taste Put the butter in a large saucepan; scald the onions, slice them very thin, and cook in the butter for five minutes, then cut the potatoes into quarters, cut the turnips into one-inch squares, and break the cauliflower into small pieces; wash the pearl barley carefully, and add all to the onions and butter; then add the seasoning and the water last of all. Cover closely, and cook gently for three hours. A little chopped parsley may be added if liked. The vegetables should be cooked until tender but not long enough to lose their shape and become mushy. It is important, too, that they should be well seasoned.
A vegetable stew built on the bones of the Irish original, with barley standing in for the mutton's body. The main thing to fix is the timing: three hours will reduce the cauliflower to nothing.
- Stagger the vegetablesThree hours at a simmer is a mutton-era timing and will turn cauliflower to pulp and potatoes to slurry. Give the barley, onions and turnips about 45 minutes, add the potatoes for the last 30, and the cauliflower for the final 10 to 12.
- Liquid1 1/2 pints is 3 cups in US measure (the book may intend an imperial pint of 20 fl oz, which would be closer to 3 1/2 cups). Either way it is a scant amount for 3 lb of potatoes plus more, so keep the lid tight and the heat very low, and top up with hot water if it threatens to catch.
- Scald the onionsHere it means a brief plunge in boiling water, which loosens the skins and takes the raw bite off. Spanish onions are the large sweet yellow sort; three of them is roughly 2 lb, and thin slicing matters because they are meant to melt into the sauce.
- TurnipsIn Scottish and Irish usage 'turnip' can mean swede (rutabaga), though English sources of the period usually mean the white turnip. Either works; white turnips cook faster and taste sharper, swede is sweeter and holds its one-inch cubes better over a long simmer.
- Pearl barleyOne ounce is about 2 tablespoons, which is a thickener rather than a bulk ingredient. Modern pearl barley needs no more than a rinse, and it will soften and release starch in about 45 minutes.
- SeasoningThe recipe goes out of its way to say the vegetables should be well seasoned, and it is right. With no meat and no stock, this stands or falls on salt; season the water at the start and correct again at the end.
- YieldRoughly 6 servings as a main dish. It reheats well and thickens further overnight.
Meatless cookbooks proliferated in the English-speaking world in the years around the First World War, when meat was expensive, rationed, or a patriotic thing to go without. A "meat substitute" in such books rarely meant an imitation of meat; it meant a dish that could hold the centre of a plate, which is exactly what this does by taking the familiar shape of Irish stew and dropping the mutton. The original stew is generally traced to the early nineteenth century as a poor household's dish of neck of mutton, potatoes and onions cooked slowly in one pot, with barley a common addition to stretch it. Strip out the mutton and the structure survives intact.