Stew
1 1/2 pounds lean beef 1 quart potatoes 2 cups cut carrots 2 cups cut onions 1 cup tomatoes 1 tablespoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 tablespoon flour 2 tablespoons chopped parsley Wipe meat, cut into small pieces, put in large kettle, cover with boiling water and boil slowly 1 1/2 hours; add carrots and onions (if onions are small leave them whole); boil 15 minutes, then add the potatoes, salt, pepper and tomatoes; add boiling water, if needed to cover vegetables; boil 30 minutes. Lift meat and vegetables out with skimmer and strain 4 cups of the stock for soup. There should be 2 cups left in kettle; add flour which has been mixed with a little cold water; boil 3 minutes; pour over meat and vegetables and sprinkle with chopped parsley.
Roast Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb With Browned Potatoes 3 1/2 or 4 pounds shoulder of lamb 2 cups stale bread crumbs 1 tablespoon finely cut onion 1 tablespoon drippings 1 tablespoon chopped parsley 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Wipe lamb with piece of wet cheese cloth; fill pocket with dressing and sew up. Put into hot oven for 20 minutes. When well seared, dust with salt and pepper, pour over 1 cup cold water and roast 45 minutes; add 1 quart white potatoes, which have been washed, pared and boiled, and roast 25 minutes longer, or until potatoes are brown. Add more water as needed, making 2 cups of gravy when finished. Thicken gravy by adding 1 tablespoon flour mixed with a little cold water, season and color with caramel. Cook until smooth.
Two dishes run together here: a beef stew that deliberately yields four cups of soup stock as a by-product, and a stuffed lamb shoulder. Both assume a cook working economically, with one pot doing two jobs.
- Volume measures for vegetablesA quart of potatoes means potatoes cut up and measured in a quart vessel, roughly 1 1/2 lb; two cups of cut carrots is about 3 medium, and two cups of onions about 2 large. The cup of tomatoes is most likely canned tomatoes with their juice, though the recipe does not specify.
- Boil means simmer"Boil slowly" is the period's phrase for a bare simmer, and that is what the beef wants: a real rolling boil at 1 1/2 hours will leave the meat stringy and cloud the stock you are meant to strain off. Hold it at a lazy bubble.
- The point of the stockThe recipe is engineered so that four cups of liquid can be lifted out for soup, leaving two cups behind for gravy. Cover the meat generously at the start and top up with boiling water, never cold, so the simmer is not interrupted.
- The flour thickeningOne tablespoon of flour to two cups of liquid gives a very thin gravy by modern taste. Slake it smooth in cold water before it goes in, and give it the full three minutes so the raw starch flavour cooks out; two tablespoons will produce something closer to a modern stew sauce.
- Potato timingThirty minutes of simmering will collapse most modern floury potatoes. Cut them in large chunks, or use a waxy variety, and start checking at 20 minutes.
- "Hot oven" for the lambThe book gives no numbers and never calls for the heat to be altered. Around 450F suits the initial 20-minute searing. Dropping to about 350F once the water goes in, and raising the heat again for the last 25 minutes to brown the potatoes, is a modern adaptation rather than anything the recipe specifies.
- Lamb donenessA 4 lb bone-in shoulder, stuffed, will be well past done after the times given. Cook to an internal temperature of 145-150F at the thickest point for pink lamb, or 160F if you want it as the book intends, and rest it 15 minutes before cutting the thread.
- Drippings and caramelThe tablespoon of drippings in the stuffing is rendered meat fat; butter works. "Colour with caramel" means a few drops of browning sauce or burnt-sugar caramel, sold then in bottles for exactly this purpose and still available as gravy browning.
- YieldThe stew serves 4 to 6 as written, plus four cups of soup stock. The lamb serves 5 or 6 with the potatoes.
Promotional cookbooks were advertising in the guise of instruction, and pages like this show how far the genre had spread beyond cake: a plain beef stew and a stuffed shoulder sit here to make the book useful enough to keep. The economy of the stew is the period's signature: the kettle produces the family's dinner and four cups of strained stock for the next day's soup, which is exactly the double duty American household manuals had long been urging. Stuffing a shoulder rather than a leg or loin is the same instinct: shoulder was the cheap end, and the bread dressing sewn into the pocket left by boning it stretched the meat further. Caramel colouring for gravy, called for so casually at the end, was a standard grocery item of the era, sold precisely because a pale flour gravy looked thin on the table.