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Fricassee of Lamb
Boil Cut two pounds of lean lamb into inch cubes; dredge with flour and brown in a frying pan, using a little suet to keep it from burning. Place in kettle and add just water enough to cover. for ten minutes and place in cooker for six hours. Thicken with one tablespoon of browned flour mixed with cold water; season to taste and serve on toast.
The text has been scrambled in typesetting: the word "Boil" at the start belongs with "for ten minutes" further down. Read it as brown the meat, cover with water, boil ten minutes, then transfer to the cooker.
- What a "cooker" is hereThis is the fireless cooker — an insulated box with a tight lid, sometimes with a preheated soapstone disc, in which a pot of boiling food finishes on retained heat alone. It is not an appliance with a heat source, and the six hours are simply the time the contents take to coast down from boiling.
- Use a slow cooker or a low oven insteadAn insulated box loses heat steadily, and a 2 lb batch of lamb in a home-made cooker may well drop out of the safe holding range before six hours are up; slow-cooling meat is the situation in which Clostridium perfringens is usually the concern. A slow cooker on low for 5 to 6 hours, or a covered pot at 300F for about 2 hours, gives a similar texture with a controlled temperature.
- The ten-minute boil is the hingeIn fireless cookery the pot must go into the box at a full rolling boil, not merely hot, since that stored heat is all the cooking there will be. If you are moving to a slow cooker or oven, bring the pot to the boil on the stove first for the same reason — starting cold wastes an hour.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers and still available shredded for puddings. A tablespoon of any neutral oil, or the lamb's own trimmed fat rendered in the pan, does the same job of keeping the dredged flour from scorching.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan or a low oven until it is the colour of sand. It has far less thickening power than raw flour, so one tablespoon in this much liquid gives a thin, gravy-like sauce rather than a stew; it was valued for colour and a faintly nutty taste. Slake it with cold water to a smooth cream before it goes near the pot.
- DredgingToss the cubes in seasoned flour in a bowl or bag and shake off the surplus. Brown them in batches in a wide pan — crowded meat steams and never takes colour, which is the whole point of the step.
- Seasoning"Season to taste" at the end means salt and pepper at minimum. A bay leaf, a sliced onion and a few peppercorns in the cooking water are entirely in period and improve a dish that is otherwise very plain.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of boneless lamb serves four. Serve on toast means dry toast in the bottom of a soup plate with the meat and its thin gravy spooned over; buttered egg noodles or mashed potato suit modern tables better.
Fireless cookery had a genuine vogue in American households from roughly 1905 through the First World War: a box packed with hay, excelsior or ground cork held a pot of boiling food long enough to finish tough cuts, and it saved coal, saved the cook's attention, and kept a summer kitchen cool. Manufactured versions with soapstone heat discs were sold alongside instructions for building one from a packing crate, and government and extension pamphlets promoted them hard during the wartime fuel conservation campaigns — which is why a section of them turns up in a general household cookbook of this period. The dish itself is the plainest sort of economy cooking: fricass rançaise ccut up and cooked in liquid, thickened at the end rather than roasted. Browned flour, used here for both colour and thrift, was something period books advise keeping on hand.