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Lamb or Mutton Stew
Breast of Lamb or Mutton 2 Onions 2 Potatoes Pepper and Salt 1 Cup Tomato Catsup Parsley Sweet Herbs Cut up potatoes in quarters or eighths and put with other ingredients in sauce pan with meat; cover with water and boil up again and serve hot. stew gently two hours; add catsup; let
The text as printed has its final lines scrambled — the order is: put everything but the catsup in the pan, cover with water, stew gently two hours, add the catsup, boil up again, serve hot. Read it that way and it works.
- Breast of lambThis is the fatty, bone-in belly section below the ribs, still sold at halal and full-service butchers but rare in supermarket cases. Ask for it cut into strips across the bones; 2 to 2 1/2 lb feeds four. Shoulder chops or neck are reasonable stand-ins.
- Skim, or the stew is greasyBreast renders a great deal of fat over two hours. Skim the surface as it comes to the boil and again before the catsup goes in, or chill the finished stew and lift the cap of fat off the top.
- A cup of catsup is a lotTomato catsup of this period was generally thinner, more vinegary and less sweet than the modern bottle, and often carried warm spices such as clove or allspice. A cup of today's ketchup will read as sugary; start with half a cup, taste, and add the rest only if the stew wants it.
- Add it at the end, as directedThe catsup goes in only for the last minutes rather than at the start. Whatever the reason, holding it back keeps the vinegar and spice bright and avoids anything sweet sitting on the bottom of the pan for two hours. The brief boil after it goes in is just to marry it in.
- Potatoes for two hoursQuartered potatoes stewed the full two hours will collapse into the liquid, which is one way to thicken it. If you want them to hold their shape, add them for the last 35 to 40 minutes instead.
- Sweet herbsThe period shorthand for thyme, marjoram, savory and a bay leaf. A teaspoon of dried mixed herbs, or a tied bundle of fresh thyme and parsley stems pulled out before serving, covers it.
- Seasoning and liquid"Cover with water" means barely — an inch over the meat at most, since nothing here concentrates the broth but time. Salt at the start, and taste again after the catsup, which brings its own.
- YieldFour servings, with bread or a second vegetable. Two potatoes and two onions is thin for four; doubling both is no harm.
Bride's cookbooks and "new housekeeper" manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries leaned hard on cheap cuts stewed long, and breast of mutton was among the cheapest meat in the butcher's window — fatty, bony, and unsuited to roasting. What may help date this particular version is the cup of bottled tomato catsup. Commercially bottled catsup became widely available in American groceries in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and it is often said that cookbooks of the period used it much as later ones use canned tomato soup: a shortcut to acidity, sweetness and spice all at once, doing the work that a cook would otherwise get from tomatoes, vinegar and a spice box. The compression of the instructions here — under fifty words, with the lines out of order — is striking in its own right.