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Irish Stew (Pounds Round Steak or Mutton)
2 Pounds Round Steak or Mutton Chops 6 Potatoes 2 Turnips 4 Onions 3/4 Quart Water Place meat in stew pan, add vegetables, pour in cold water; cover closely, let stew gently till vegetables are ready to mash, and the greater part of gravy is absorbed. Serve hot.
A bare-bones stew from a wedding-gift cookbook: five ingredients, no salt, no browning, no stated time. The instructions are workable, but a few things need translating.
- The water measure3/4 quart is 3 cups (about 700 ml). That is deliberately little — the point is a thick, nearly absorbed gravy rather than soup, so keep the lid tight and the heat very low. Add a splash of hot water only if the pan threatens to go dry before the meat is tender.
- No browning, and that is correctTraditional Irish stew starts everything in cold water without searing. The result is pale and mild rather than deeply savoury; if you brown the meat you have made something else, which is fine but no longer this recipe.
- Meat, and how longRound steak and mutton chops are both slow-cooking cuts. Cut the steak into 1 1/2-inch pieces and expect 1 1/2 to 2 hours at a bare simmer; bone-in mutton or lamb shoulder chops want about the same. Mutton — sheep over a year old — is rarely sold in the US now; lamb shoulder or neck is the closest substitute and cooks slightly faster.
- TurnipsIn American books of this sort "turnip" generally means the small white purple-topped root rather than rutabaga, which was usually specified as Swede or yellow turnip. Two of them, peeled and quartered, is roughly 1/2 to 3/4 lb. Rutabaga works but is sweeter and needs longer.
- Timing the vegetablesWhole potatoes and onions added at the start with a two-hour meat will collapse entirely — which is in fact what "ready to mash" describes, and it is what thickens the gravy. If you want distinct potatoes, hold half of them back for the final 30 minutes and let the rest disintegrate.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none, as many books of this type assumed it. Salt the water at the start (about a teaspoon), pepper generously, and a bay leaf or parsley stalk is within tradition.
- YieldTwo pounds of meat with six potatoes serves four generously, five at a stretch. It reheats better than it keeps its looks.
Irish stew as printed here is the standard nineteenth-century Anglo-American version: mutton, potatoes, onions, water, cooked slowly in one covered pot. The dish is generally traced to the cheap sheep meat and abundant potatoes of rural Ireland, where a single pot over a fire did all the cooking; purists have long argued that turnips and carrots are intruders, but many American cookbooks put them in. The offer of "round steak or mutton chops" hints that this may be a US book he markets of the period, where mutton was still sold but was already losing ground to beef, and a bride shopping in town was more likely to find round steak. The Bride's Cook Book belongs to a genre of small volumes given as wedding presents.