Home › Fireless Cookery › Irish Stew (Pound mutton breast Salt)
Irish Stew (Pound mutton breast Salt)
1 pound mutton breast Salt and pepper 1 tablespoon butter 1 slice onion 1 cup green peas 1 cup potatoes 1½ cups boiling water Rub the mutton breast with salt and pepper; cut up into small pieces; brown in butter; add the onion and cook until the onion is yellow. Add the potatoes, cut in cubes, the peas and boiling water; season and cook ten minutes over the fire. Remove t cooker and leave for one hour, using one radiator.
This is a retained-heat recipe: the food is brought to a boil on the stove, then sealed into an insulated box with a preheated metal disc to finish. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- What the "radiator" isA fireless cooker came with soapstone or cast-iron discs that were heated on the range until very hot and set in the well beneath the food. "Using one radiator" means a single disc, the setting for a mild, moist finish rather than a browning heat.
- If you have no fireless cookerA heavy pot with a tight lid, brought to a full boil and then wrapped in towels inside a cooler, behaves much the same way, as does a wide-mouth vacuum flask. A slow cooker on low reaches the same end by a different route, but it will need longer than an hour.
- Start genuinely boilingThe whole method depends on the pot going into the insulation at the boil. Water that is merely hot, or a pot left uncovered on the counter while you find the lid, drops the contents into a lukewarm hour instead of a hot one.
- Mutton breastMutton breast is the fatty rib section of a mature sheep, rarely sold now. Lamb breast or riblets are the closest thing; boneless lamb shoulder cut in cubes works and is easier to find. Trim hard fat, since an hour in a sealed box gives it nowhere to render away.
- An hour may not be enoughTen minutes of boiling plus an hour of falling heat will cook small pieces of young lamb through, but mutton from an older animal is tough and wants real simmering. Check a piece before serving; if it resists, finish it on the stove rather than trusting the box.
- The peasA cup of fresh shelled peas added at the start will be grey and soft after an hour. Frozen peas stirred in at the end, off the heat, keep their colour and need no cooking.
- "Over the fire"Simply the stovetop. The text says only "cook ten minutes"; since the pot has to enter the insulation at the boil, take that as a full boil rather than a gentle simmer.
- YieldOne pound of meat with a cup each of potatoes and peas feeds two, or three at a lunch.
Fireless cookery was a genuine movement in American households between roughly 1900 and the First World War, promoted for fuel economy and for freeing the cook from a hot kitchen in summer. The principle is older and is generally traced to the Norwegian haybox, an insulated crate packed with hay in which a boiling pot finished cooking on its own stored heat; American manufacturers refined it into a lidded cabinet with soapstone discs. Cookbooks of the period carried whole chapters adapting familiar dishes to the method. Irish stew was an obvious candidate, being a long, wet, forgiving dish of mutton, potato and onion, though the original would not brown the meat at all, and the butter and browning here mark this as an American kitchen's improvement on the original.