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Irish Stew (Tablespoon butter or drippings)
1 tablespoon butter or drippings 2 onions 6 parboiled potatoes 1 carrot Salt and pepper Cut the meat into pieces two inches square; brown in the butter; add water to cover the meat and the onions sliced. Cover closely and simmer two hours. Add more water if necessary, parboiled potatoes cut in half, a sliced carrot and seasoning. Cover and cook one hour longer; let the potatoes be soft but not broken. Thicken as desired.
A bay leaf cooked with the meat or a little Worcestershire sauce added to the gravy when finished improves the flavor.
A braise of the plainest kind: brown, simmer long, add the vegetables late. The method survives intact; only the quantities and a few assumptions need translating.
- The meatThe ingredient list gives no weight for the meat itself. For this amount of aromatics, reckon on 2 lb of boneless lamb or mutton shoulder, or the same weight in neck chops, cut into two-inch pieces.
- DrippingsBeef or bacon drippings were common household fat in this period, and give a rounder flavour than butter, which will brown and burn at searing heat. Butter alone is workable if you brown over moderate rather than fierce heat.
- Brown properlyThis is the hinge. Dry the meat, work in two batches, and do not crowd the pan; meat that steams rather than browns leaves the gravy pale and thin-tasting, and nothing later in the recipe recovers it.
- Parboiled potatoesBoil whole peeled potatoes about 10 minutes so they are set on the outside but raw at the centre, then halve them. Waxy varieties hold their shape best over the final hour, which is what the instruction about soft but not broken is asking for.
- Three hours is not excessiveTwo hours of simmering on the meat, then one more with the vegetables, suits mutton and older lamb. If you use lean modern lamb leg rather than shoulder or neck, check at 90 minutes and add the potatoes then, or it will dry out.
- Simmer, not boilKeep the surface barely trembling. A low oven with the lid on holds a steadier simmer than a burner, though the recipe itself is written for the stovetop.
- Thicken as desiredA tablespoon of flour rubbed into an equal weight of butter, whisked into the simmering liquid, will thicken the gravy in a couple of minutes. Traditional Irish stew is left unthickened and relies on the potato starch.
- YieldFour generous servings, with bread to catch the gravy.
Irish stew as printed in American cookbooks of this era had already drifted a long way from the Irish original, which was mutton (sometimes kid), onion, potato and water, layered in a pot and left to cook down until the potatoes on the bottom collapsed into the liquid. Browning the meat first, adding carrot, and finishing with Worcestershire sauce are later Anglo-American habits that would have been out of place in a nineteenth-century Irish cottage kitchen, where a frying step meant fuel spent for no calories gained. The version here reflects how the dish was understood in the United States by the early twentieth century: a general-purpose braise carrying an Irish name.