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Brown Mutton Stew with Dumplings
2 pounds mutton 1/2 cup cut onion 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 tablespoon caramel 1 tablespoon flour 1 tablespoon chopped parsley Cut meat into 2 inch pieces and brown in frying pan. Put into kettle and add enough boiling water to cover. Boil slowly 1 hour. Add onion, salt, pepper, caramel and flour, which has been mixed with a little cold water. Boil until tender. Add dumplings and boil 10 minutes without lifting cover. Put meat in center of hot platter with dumplings around edge and sprinkle with parsley.
A plain braise from a baking-powder company's booklet, written when mutton was a supermarket staple and cooks were expected to know the dumpling recipe by heart. Two things need attention: the meat and the caramel.
- Mutton, and what to use insteadMutton is sheep over a year old, strongly flavoured and firm; it is sold in some halal and Caribbean markets but is uncommon in general butchers. Two pounds of boned lamb shoulder or neck behaves closest to it, though it will be milder and will reach tenderness sooner.
- Caramel is not caramel sauceIn period cookbooks "caramel" means sugar cooked black and dissolved in water — a bitter colouring, not a sweetener. A tablespoon of gravy browning or a browning liquid such as Kitchen Bouquet does the same job. Skip it and the stew tastes the same but looks pale.
- "Boil slowly" means simmerAn actual boil will tighten and shred the meat. Hold the pot at a bare tremble, lid ajar, for the first hour and then until the pieces yield to a fork — reckon 1½ to 2 hours total for mutton, closer to 1¼ for lamb.
- The dumplings are elsewhere in the bookThe dumplings are not given here -- No dumpling formula appears on this page; the recipe assumes the cook already has one. Any standard drop-dumpling recipe will do: roughly 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, a tablespoon of fat and about 3/4 cup milk, dropped in spoonfuls.
- Do not lift the coverThis is the hinge of the last ten minutes. Dumplings cook in trapped steam above the liquid; releasing it collapses the rise and leaves them dense in the middle. Keep the liquid at a steady simmer so the steam is continuous.
- One tablespoon of flour is barely a thickenerIn two pounds of meat's worth of broth it gives a light gravy, not a stew sauce. If you want body, slurry two or three tablespoons instead, and add it before the dumplings go in — flour stirred in afterwards will not have time to cook out.
- Skim before the dumplingsMutton throws a good deal of fat and grey scum. Lift it off before thickening, or the dumplings will sit in grease and the gravy will break.
- YieldServes four with the dumplings, three if they are hungry. The original's platter service — meat heaped centre, dumplings ringed round, parsley over — is worth keeping; it is the whole presentation.
This is the kind of recipe carried in the promotional cookbooks that baking powder makers distributed free or for a few cents through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to build demand for chemical leavening. That commercial purpose would explain the dumplings: a beef or mutton stew needs no baking powder, but a drop dumpling does, and putting one on top of the other put the product into a meat course. The mutton itself is the period detail that has aged furthest. American and British households ate a great deal of it -- sheep were kept for wool and eaten late in life -- and it was cheap enough to stew. As lamb-focused breeding and year-round slaughter took hold in the twentieth century, mutton largely vanished from English-speaking markets, surviving mainly in South Asian, Caribbean and Middle Eastern cooking. The "caramel" is another marker of its date: burnt-sugar syrup was a familiar home-made colouring for darkening pale gravies.