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Scalloped Lamb
Remove skin and fat from thin slices of cold roast lamb, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cover bottom of a buttered baking-dish with buttered cracker crumbs; cover meat with boiled macaroni, and add another layer of meat and macaroni. Pour over Tomato Sauce, and cover with buttered cracker crumbs. Bake in hot oven until crumbs are brown. Cold boiled rice may be used in place of macaroni.
A leftover dish from the era when a Sunday leg of lamb was expected to reappear twice more. The instructions have a small gap worth fixing before you start.
- The missing lineAs printed, the crumbs go down and then "cover meat with boiled macaroni" — the first layer of meat is never explicitly laid in. Build it crumbs, lamb, macaroni, lamb, macaroni, sauce, crumbs.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "hot oven" is usually rendered today as somewhere around 400–425F. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so you are browning the top and heating through: 20–25 minutes should be enough.
- Buttered cracker crumbsCrush plain soda crackers or saltines coarsely and toss with melted butter, roughly 2 tablespoons butter per cup of crumbs, until the crumbs are just glossy. Dry crumbs will scorch before they brown evenly.
- Cold lamb, sliced thinSlice it as thin as you can while cold and straight from the refrigerator; thick slices stay dense and dry in a scallop. Trim the fat and the papery skin as directed — reheated lamb fat is the part that tastes muttony.
- Tomato sauceFarmer's tomato sauce elsewhere in the book is a butter-and-flour roux with strained stewed tomatoes and seasoning. Any plain, fairly thin tomato sauce works; you want about 1½ to 2 cups, enough to moisten the macaroni thoroughly without flooding it.
- MacaroniCook it just to tender, not al dente — it will not soften much further in the short bake, but it will absorb sauce. Elbow or short-cut macaroni suits the layering better than long tubes.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a working guide, about 2 cups of sliced meat with 2 cups cooked macaroni will fill a 1½-quart dish and serve about four.
"Scalloped" in nineteenth-century American cookbooks means a dish built in layers with crumbs above and usually below, baked until the top browns. The name is generally traced to the scallop shells once used as individual baking vessels, though the word's history is tangled with "escallop"/"collop" for a thin slice, and the shell derivation is not settled. By Fannie Farmer's day the method was a common way of turning cold cooked food into a second hot meal, and The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book carries a number of them: scalloped fish, scalloped chicken, scalloped potatoes, scalloped oysters. The macaroni is of its period, being by then cheaply available and manufactured in the United States, and treated as a starchy extender rather than an Italian dish in its own right. The dish belongs to a household economy in which a large roast was expected to yield more than one meal.