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Mutton, Haricot (INGREDIENTS for dish)
INGREDIENTS for dish for 8 persons. -4 lbs. of the middle or best end of the neck of mutton, 3 carrots, 3 turnips, 3 onions, pepper and salt to taste, 1 tablespoonful of ketchup or Harvey's sauce.
AVERAGE COST, 3s.
Trim off some of the fat, cut the mutton into rather thin chops and put them into a frying-pan with the fat trimmings. Fry of a pale brown, but do not cook them enough for eating. Cut the carrots and turnips into dice and the onions into slices, and slightly fry them in the same fat that the mutton was browned in, but do not allow them to take any colour. Now lay the mutton at the bottom of a stewpan, then the vegetables, and pour over them just sufficient boiling water to cover the whole. Give them a boil, skim well and then set the pan on the side of the fire to simmer gently until the meat is tender. Skim off every particle of is tender.
Skim off every particle of fat, add a seasoning of pepper and salt and a little ketchup, and serve. This dish is very much better if made the day before it is wanted for table, as the fat can be so much more easily removed when the gravy is cold. This should be particularly attended to, as it is apt to be rich and greasy if eaten the same day it is made.
It should be served in rather a deep dish.
TIME.-2½ hours to simmer gently.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A plain braise of neck chops with root vegetables, and one of the few Victorian dishes that openly instructs you to make it a day ahead. The chilling-and-defatting step is the whole point of the recipe, not an afterthought.
- Make it the day beforeMrs Beeton is right that skimming hot fat from neck of mutton is a losing battle. Cook it, cool it, refrigerate overnight, lift the solid fat off in sheets, then reheat gently to serving temperature. Skipping this gives exactly the greasy dish she warns about.
- No beans, despite the name"Haricot" here has nothing to do with haricot beans. Do not add any; the dish is meat and root vegetables only.
- The cutMiddle or best end of neck of mutton corresponds roughly to lamb rib cutlets and the chops nearer the shoulder. Ask for shoulder or neck chops on the bone. Mutton (usually taken to mean sheep over a year or two old) is sold by some halal and specialist butchers; lamb works but is milder and cooks faster.
- TimingTwo hours of bare simmering suits mutton. Lamb shoulder chops are usually tender in 75 to 90 minutes. Test with a fork rather than the clock — the meat should give without falling to threads.
- Heat control"Set the pan on the side of the fire" means the coolest part of the range. On a modern hob use the lowest setting with the lid ajar, or transfer the covered pot to a 300F oven, which holds a sub-simmer far more reliably.
- Ketchup and Harvey's sauceThe ketchup meant is mushroom or walnut ketchup, a thin dark savoury liquid, not tomato. Harvey's sauce was a commercial anchovy-and-soy relish, long discontinued. A tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, or mushroom ketchup if you can find it, gives the intended salty-umami lift.
- Don't brown the vegetablesThe instruction to fry the carrot, turnip and onion without colour is deliberate: this is meant to be a pale, clean-tasting stew, not a dark braise. Browning them turns it into something else.
- Liquid and bodyBoiling water only just to cover, and no flour anywhere. The result is closer to a thin broth than a thickened gravy, which may be why she asks for rather a deep dish. Serve in bowls with mashed or boiled potatoes and bread.
- Yield and costFour pounds of chops on the bone will feed six to eight generously. The 3s average cost is a period retail figure and has no modern equivalent worth converting.
The name is the puzzle: an English "haricot of mutton" contains no haricot beans, and the word is generally traced to the French haricoter or the older hericoq, meaning to cut up or a dish of cut-up meat. Recipes for "haricot mutton" run through English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward, and by Mrs Beeton's day it was firmly a household dish rather than a fashionable one: neck of mutton was among the cheapest joints on the block, and the carrot-turnip-onion trio was what any kitchen had to hand year round, which is why the entry is marked seasonable at any time. What dates the recipe most precisely is the seasoning. Mushroom ketchup and Harvey's sauce were the bottled savouries of the mid-Victorian larder, bought in and used exactly as a modern cook reaches for Worcestershire sauce or stock concentrate, and their casual appearance at the end of a plain stew shows how thoroughly commercial condiments had already entered domestic cooking by the 1860s.