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Mutton (Tablespoons chopped onion)
2 tablespoons chopped onion 2 tablespoons butter or drippings Salt and pepper 2 cups water 1½ pounds mutton or lamb Cooked lima beans Select lean meat and cut it into two-inch pieces. Fry the onions in the butter; add the meat; season and brown; cover with water; 12 3 4 1. Neck 2. Chuck 3. Shoulder 4. Flank 5. Loin 6. Leg 6 54 23 DIAGRAM OF CUTS OF LAMB AND MUTTON cook until tender and serve in a border of lima beans, well cooked and seasoned with salt, pepper, butter and chopped parsley.
A plain braise: onion, browned meat, water, long slow cooking, served ringed with buttered lima beans. The stray numbers in the middle of the text are the caption of a cuts-of-lamb diagram that sat on the page, not part of the method.
- The hinge: brown properly, then keep it barely simmeringThe only flavour in this dish beyond salt and pepper comes from the browning, so get the pieces coloured on all sides in a wide pan before adding water. Once the water goes in, hold it at a bare simmer — a rolling boil squeezes mutton into strings.
- Mutton vs. lamb timingTrue mutton (sheep over two years) needs about 1½ to 2 hours covered before it gives; supermarket lamb shoulder is tender in 60 to 75 minutes. "Cook until tender" is the real instruction — test with a fork rather than a clock.
- Which cutThe recipe says only 'select lean meat'. Of the cuts the diagram labels, shoulder, neck or chuck suit this method best: collagen-rich cuts that reward the long cook. Leg and loin, also on the diagram, will go dry and are better roasted.
- Two cups of water is a braise, not a stewFor 1½ lb of meat cut in two-inch pieces, two cups will not cover it in most pans. Use a lid and a narrow pan so the liquid comes most of the way up, and top up sparingly; the finished sauce should be a spoonful or two of concentrated pan juices per serving.
- The lima beans'Cooked lima beans' could be fresh, dried or canned; if you use dried, figure about 1 cup dried, or roughly 1 lb of frozen limas, for four people. Dress them with butter, salt, pepper and parsley off the heat so the parsley stays green.
- Drippings'Butter or drippings' means saved meat fat, most often beef. Beef drippings or a neutral oil both work; butter alone will darken while you brown the meat, so add it after the searing if you want the flavour without the scorch.
- Yield1½ lb of bone-in shoulder serves three; boneless, four modest portions. Spoon the meat into the centre of a warm platter with the beans banked around the edge, which is what "a border" means here.
Mutton diagrams appeared in early twentieth-century American cookbooks because home cooks were being taught to buy by the cut, and the cheap, hard-working shoulder and neck were where economical cookery lived. Mutton was still ordinary meat in the United States when this was written, and it faded from American markets over the following decades for reasons often traced to changes in sheep raising and a growing preference for younger, milder lamb, which is why the book can offer the two words interchangeably in a way a modern butcher cannot. The lima bean border is a period convention as much as a side dish: serving a stew inside a ring of beans, rice or mashed potato was a familiar convention in household manuals of the era, giving a shapeless dish a presentable outline on the platter.