China Chilo
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons.-1½ lb. of leg, loin or neck of mutton, 2 onions, 2 lettuces, 1 pint of green peas, 1 teaspoonful of salt, 1 teaspoonful of pepper, pint of water, lb. of CHOCOLATE CREAM. clarified butter, when liked, a little cayenne.
AVERAGE COST, 2s.
Mince the above quantity of undressed leg, loin or neck of mutton, adding a little of the fat, also minced; put it into a stewpan with the remaining ingredients, previously shredding the lettuce and onion rather fine; closely cover the stewpan, after the ingredients have been well stirred, and simmer gently for rather more than 2 hours. Serve in a dish, with a border of rice round, the same as for curry.
TIME. Rather more than 2 hours.
SEASONABLE from June to August.
Chocolate Almonds. INGREDIENTS. -Almonds, chocolate.
Blanch the almonds: putting them in hot water, then rubbing off the skin. Melt some chocolate, take up each almond on a long pin, dip in the chocolate and lay on a buttered slab to cool.
A Victorian mutton mince stewed slowly with lettuce, onion and peas — closer to a braise than a curry, despite the rice border. It needs a heavy pan and a genuinely low flame.
- The lettuce is the pointTwo whole lettuces, shredded fine, collapse into the meat and provide most of the liquid and body. Use firm cos or iceberg rather than soft leaf, which turns to slime.
- Missing quantitiesThe water and the clarified butter have both lost their fractions in this printing, and a stray line ('CHOCOLATE CREAM') from the neighbouring column has dropped into the ingredient list. The amounts cannot be recovered from this text; aim for a mixture that is moist rather than soupy, since the vegetables release a good deal of liquid.
- Mince it yourself"Undressed" means raw. Coarse-mince or hand-chop the leg, loin or neck the recipe names, with a little of its own fat; supermarket lamb mince is finer and fattier and can go pasty over two hours.
- Heat and vesselA stewpan here is a heavy lidded saucepan or small casserole. Cover tightly and keep it at the barest simmer — a bare bubble every few seconds — or the bottom scorches before the two hours are up.
- Peas lastA pint of shelled peas is about 350g, which means something like 1½–2 lb of peas in the pod. Frozen peas added at the start will disintegrate; stir them in for the final ten minutes.
- SeasoningA full teaspoon of pepper is aggressive by modern taste. Start with half, add cayenne at the end, and salt to taste after the lettuce has given up its water.
- ServingServes four with the rice border. Plain long-grain rice, pressed into a ring mould or simply spooned round the edge of a warm dish, is what is meant.
The name is a piece of Victorian exoticism rather than any Chinese connection: "chilo" is often said to be an English mangling of "chilli", though this is folk etymology rather than established fact, and the dish appears in English cookery books from the early nineteenth century, well before Isabella Beeton collected it. There is nothing Chinese in it — the seasoning is salt, pepper and a little cayenne — but the mince-and-rice presentation put it in the same mental drawer as curry for British cooks, and Beeton's instruction to serve it with a rice border "the same as for curry" makes that lineage plain. Its June-to-August season is set by the green peas and lettuces, and it sits alongside the many Victorian recipes in which a small quantity of raw mutton is made to feed a family.