Mutton Croquettes
INGREDIENTS.-Lean cold roast mutton, potatoes, flour, 1 egg, salt, pepper, hot lard.
Mince the meat finely, taking away all gristle, and season well with salt and pepper. Boil some potatoes, and mash them with a very little butter and seasoning, then make them into a paste with flour and egg. Roll out this paste and cut into rounds, lay on one half some of the minced meat, then fold over and pinch the edges together as a sausage roll or puff. Fry a nice brown in hot lard.
TIME. hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Mutton, Curried. (Cold Meat Cookery.)--INGREDIENTS for small dish.- The remains of any joint of cold mutton, 2 onions, 3 oz. of butter, 1 dessertspoonful of curry-powder, 1 dessertspoonful of flour, salt to taste, 1/4 pint of stock or water. AVERAGE Cost, exclusive of the meat, 6d.
Slice the onions in thin rings and put them into a stewpan with the butter, and fry of a light brown; stir in the currypowder, flour and salt, and mix all together. Cut the meat into nice thin slices (if there is not sufficient to do this it may be minced), and add it to the other ingredients; when well browned, add the stock or gravy and stew gently for about 1/2 hour.
Serve in a dish with a border of boiled rice, or some in a vegetable dish.
TIME.-- hour.
SEASONABLE in winter.
MUTTON CUTLETS.
Two entries run together here: croquettes made from the ends of a roast leg or shoulder, and a curry of the same. Both are Victorian leftover cookery, written for a cook who already knew the proportions, so the quantities have to be judged by eye.
- Proportions for the pasteFor about 12 oz of minced cooked mutton, work with roughly 1 lb of boiled floury potatoes, mashed with a knob of butter, then bound with 1 beaten egg and 2-3 oz of flour. Add the flour a spoonful at a time: the paste should just hold together when rolled, and too much makes it leaden.
- Mash it dryThe hinge of the croquette recipe. Boiled potato holds a great deal of water, and a wet mash will absorb flour endlessly and still burst in the fat. Drain the potatoes hard, return them to the dry pan over low heat for a minute to steam off, then mash.
- Roll coldThe book does not say so, but potato paste is far easier to roll and seal when it has cooled completely. Chill the rolled-out rounds briefly before filling and pinching.
- Frying fat and heatHot lard means deep or shallow fat at about 350-375F. Below that the potato drinks fat and disintegrates; above it the outside colours before the filling has heated through. The filling is already cooked, so you are browning the crust and warming the centre, three to four minutes a side.
- The stated timeBoth times have lost their fractions in the printing: "TIME. hour" for the croquettes and "1/21 hour" in the curry. The curry is told to stew gently for about half an hour; the croquettes' figure cannot be recovered from this text, and in any case boiling and mashing the potatoes has to be added to it.
- Curry-powder, then and nowA Victorian commercial curry-powder was heavy on turmeric, coriander and fenugreek with modest chilli. A dessertspoonful of a modern mild curry powder is a fair equivalent; fry it in the butter with the flour for a minute before the liquid goes in, or the raw spice will taste dusty.
- Reheating cooked meatThe mutton is already roast. In the curry, add it late and stew only long enough to heat it and marry the sauce, otherwise thin slices of roast meat go stringy in half an hour of simmering.
- YieldThe croquette quantities above give six to eight parcels, enough for three as a supper dish. The curry is explicitly headed "for small dish".
The curry is labelled "Cold Meat Cookery", a strand that runs through the whole book and is a clear sign of what a Victorian middle-class kitchen was for. A large joint was roasted for Sunday and had to reappear, disguised, for several days after; croquettes, rissoles, hashes and curries existed to make the third appearance of a leg of mutton look like a new dish. Mutton was then the everyday roasting meat of Britain in a way it has not been since the mid-twentieth century, when lamb largely displaced it. The curry reflects the other great influence on the Victorian table: proprietary curry-powder, sold ready-blended by British firms from the late eighteenth century onward, which reduced an Indian technique to a single spoonful of blended spice stirred into a flour-thickened stew and served with a border of boiled rice. The result is not Indian cooking but a settled British dish in its own right, and one that survived in domestic and institutional kitchens well into living memory.