Mutton, Hashed
INGREDIENTS. -The remains of cold roast shoulder or leg of mutton, 6 whole peppers, 6 whole allspice, a faggot of savoury herbs, 1/21 head of celery, 1 onion, 2 oz. of butter, flour. AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the meat, 4d.
Cut the meat in nice even slices from the bones, trimming off all superfluous fat and gristle; chop the bones and fragments of the joints, put them into a stewpan with the pepper, spice, herbs and celery; cover with water and simmer for 1 hour. Slice and fry the onion of a nice pale brown colour, dredge in a little flour to make it thick, and add this to the bones, &c. Stew for hour, strain the gravy, and let it cool; then skim off every particle of fat, and put it, with the meat, into a stewpan. Flavour with ketchup, Harvey's sauce, tomato sauce, or any flavouring that may be preferred, and let the meat gradually warm through, but not boil, or it will harden. To hash meat properly, it should be laid in MUTTON, HAUNCH OF.
MUTTON, LEG OF. cold gravy and only left on the fire just meat, and send caper sauce to table with it long enough to warm through.
TIME.-1 hour to simmer the gravy.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A Victorian second-day dish: the cold joint is sliced, and a fresh gravy is built from the bones while the meat is barely warmed through. The whole method turns on that last point.
- Never let it boilAlready-cooked mutton put back into simmering liquid contracts and turns dry and stringy. Bring the strained gravy to a bare steam, slide in the slices, and hold them below a simmer for five to ten minutes only.
- Faggot of savoury herbsA small bundle tied with string: parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf is the standard reading. Tie it so it can be lifted out before straining.
- Whole peppers and allspiceWhole black peppercorns and whole allspice berries, six of each. They go into the bone stock, not the finished sauce, and are strained out.
- The celeryThe quantity as printed is unclear; half a head of celery, roughly three or four ribs with their leaves, suits the volume of stock here.
- StewpanAny wide saucepan with a lid. The bones need only be barely covered with water, so a pan that fits them snugly gives a stronger gravy.
- The flourDredging flour over the fried onion is a rough roux. The recipe gives no quantity for either the flour or the stock; about two level tablespoons over the onions cooked in the 2 oz butter will lightly thicken roughly a pint of gravy. Cook it a minute before the liquid goes in or the gravy tastes raw.
- SkimmingCooling the strained gravy is not optional fussiness. Mutton fat sets hard and lifts off cleanly once chilled, and hashed mutton is greasy if it is not removed. Chilling in the refrigerator for an hour does the job.
- FlavouringsHarvey's sauce is a discontinued anchovy-and-soy bottled condiment; Worcestershire sauce is the nearest thing on a modern shelf. Mushroom ketchup, if you have it, is closer to what Beeton meant by ketchup than the tomato kind.
- YieldDepends entirely on the leftover joint. Reckon on the gravy from one set of bones dressing enough meat for four.
Hashes of this sort were the structural backbone of the Victorian middle-class week: a large joint roasted on Sunday, carved cold on Monday, and hashed or minced thereafter, with the bones worked for a second round of gravy so that nothing bought was thrown away. Beeton's costing line, fourpence exclusive of the meat, may reasonably be read — though the page itself states no such intent — as pricing the dish at the cost of reviving something already paid for. The insistence that hashed meat be laid in cold gravy and only warmed through is one of the oldest pieces of English kitchen advice on the subject, repeated in cookery books well before Beeton, and it survives because it is correct.