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Ragout of Mutton
1½ pounds neck of mutton 1 tablespoon butter 1½ tablespoons flour 1 chopped onion 1 carrot cut in dice 2 cups hot water 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Sprig of parsley 1 bay leaf 1 whole clove 1/2 can peas Put butter in the frying pan; when melted, add flour and brown. Add carrot, onion and meat and cook until all are browned. Put in a kettle; add water, salt and pepper and the herbs, tied in a bouquet so that they can be removed. Cover and simmer for two hours, adding the peas ten minutes before serving and removing the herbs.
Neck of mutton
A plain brown stew of the old school: flour browned in fat, meat and root vegetables seared in it, then a long slow simmer. Nothing here is unsafe, but a few of the ingredients and habits need translating.
- Mutton, and what to buy insteadTrue mutton — sheep over a year old, often two or three — is rare outside halal and specialty butchers. Lamb neck or shoulder works with the same method, though it is milder and may be tender in 90 minutes rather than two hours.
- Neck is the right cutNeck is collagen-rich and bony, which is what gives the sauce body; a lean leg cut will go dry and the gravy will stay thin. Buy it bone-in and expect roughly 1 lb of meat off 1½ lb of neck.
- Brown the flour properlyThis is the hinge. The tablespoon of butter and 1½ tablespoons of flour are a roux, and it wants to go a real nut-brown before anything else joins it — several minutes over medium heat, stirred. Underbrowned, the stew tastes pasty; that is the usual failure with this style of recipe.
- Two cups of water is not muchIt should barely cover the meat, and with a tight lid on a low burner it will hold for two hours. Check at the halfway mark and top up with hot water if the pan is going dry. Stock in place of water is a straightforward improvement.
- "Kettle" means the potIn American books of this date a kettle is a heavy lidded stewpan, not a tea kettle. A Dutch oven is the modern equivalent. The recipe calls for a covered simmer on the burner; a low oven will hold the same gentle heat if you would rather not watch it.
- Half a can of peasCanned peas of the period were fully cooked and soft, hence the ten minutes at the end. Frozen peas need two or three minutes, stirred in off the heat if you like them green. Half a modern can is roughly 3/4 cup drained.
- Bouquet garniParsley, bay and a single clove tied in cheesecloth or bundled with kitchen string. The clove is easy to lose in the stew and unpleasant to bite into, which is the whole point of tying it up.
- YieldServes two generously, three at a stretch. Doubling works without adjustment beyond a wider pan for the browning.
Ragout comes from the French ragoûter, to revive the appetite, and by the eighteenth century it had settled in English into meaning any stew of small pieces of meat in a thickened brown sauce. Mutton was a common red meat in Britain into the early twentieth century, cheap and strongly flavoured, and the neck was among the cheapest parts of it — which is why cookbooks of Mrs. Fryer's generation return to it so often with instructions for long, wet, well-seasoned cooking. The half can of peas is unremarkable for its time: commercially canned vegetables had been ordinary in an American kitchen since the 1870s, common enough to be written into a recipe without comment, and a household cook could reach for winter peas without apology.