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Irish Stew with Dumplings
Wipe and cut in pieces three pounds lamb from the forequarter. Put in kettle, cover with boiling water, and cook slowly two hours or until tender. After cooking one hour add one-half cup each carrot and turnip cut in one-half inch cubes, and one onion cut in slices. Fifteen minutes before serving add four cups potatoes cut in one-fourth inch slices, previously parboiled five minutes in boiling water. Thicken with one-fourth cup flour, diluted with enough cold water to form a thin smooth paste. Season with salt and pepper, serve with Dumplings. (See p. 205.)
A straightforward braise that needs little translation, though the meat cut and the potato handling are worth a word.
- Lamb from the forequarterThe shoulder, neck, breast and foreshank: bone-in and fatty, well suited to two hours of slow cooking. A boneless shoulder cut into 1½-inch pieces works; leaner cuts such as leg or loin are more likely to go dry.
- "Cook slowly" means a bare simmerThe surface should barely tremble. A rolling boil over two hours will shred the meat into threads and cloud the broth.
- Skim earlyThe recipe does not mention it. Once the water returns to a simmer, lift off the grey foam, or it will disperse into the liquid and dull both flavour and colour.
- TurnipIn this book turnip means white turnip, not rutabaga (which period American cookbooks tend to call Swede or yellow turnip). Either works; rutabaga is sweeter and denser, and may want a little longer.
- Why the potatoes are parboiledFive minutes in fresh boiling water rinses off surface starch and gives the slices a head start, so they are likelier to hold their shape over the last quarter hour instead of breaking down and thickening the stew themselves.
- The flour thickeningA quarter cup of flour slaked in cold water is a slurry, not a roux. Stir it in gradually with the pot at a simmer and let it cook three or four minutes — raw flour tastes of paste.
- DumplingsThe reference is to the book's baking-powder dumplings. They steam on top of the stew with the lid on and the lid kept on; lifting it partway through gives you dense, sodden dumplings.
- YieldThree pounds of bone-in forequarter with four cups of potato serves five or six generously.
Irish stew in Ireland was traditionally made with mutton, and by some accounts kid, together with potato and onion cooked in water — no carrot, no turnip, no thickening, the potato itself breaking down to body the liquid. What appears here is the Anglo-American version that had settled into print by the late nineteenth century: root vegetables added, flour stirred in at the end, dumplings on top, a topping often said to derive from the English boiled pudding. Fannie Merritt Farmer's 1896 book was written for Boston households cooking on coal and gas ranges, and it did much to popularise level measurements; the recipe shows it — every quantity is specified, including the parboiling time for the potatoes, in a dish that in its home country was cooked with little or no measuring. The forequarter call is also economical: it was the cheap end of the lamb, and long slow simmering was the standard way of making it worth eating.