Mutton Haricot
2 Pounds Breast Mutton 2 Onions Sliced 1 Pint Parboiled Potatoes 1 Pint Shelled Peas Barley Flour Drippings Cut meat in pieces, roll in flour and brown in drippings. Put in stew pan, add onions, cover with boiling water and simmer until very tender. Add potatoes and peas, season, and simmer until vegetables are done. 3 Sweetbreads 1/2 Pint Veal Stock Green Onions 2 Eggs 1 Pint Cream
A plain braise of breast of mutton with root vegetables, written in the telegraphic style of turn-of-the-century wedding-gift cookbooks. The list of measurements is loose and the last line does not belong to this dish at all.
- The stray ingredient listThe trailing "3 Sweetbreads, 1/2 Pint Veal Stock, Green Onions, 2 Eggs, 1 Pint Cream" does not belong to this dish; it reads as the ingredient list of another recipe run together with this one. Ignore it entirely here; none of it goes into the haricot.
- BarleyBarley is listed but never mentioned in the method. Add about 1/3 cup pearl barley with the boiling water so it has the full simmer to soften, and expect it to thicken the gravy considerably. Hulled barley needs longer still.
- Breast of muttonMutton (sheep generally two years or older) is hard to find outside halal and specialty butchers. Lamb breast or, better for this treatment, boneless lamb shoulder cut in 2-inch pieces will work; shoulder gives comparable collagen with less of the fat that runs through a breast. Trim breast hard if you use it, or the finished gravy is greasy.
- DrippingsBeef or lamb dripping, the fat saved from roasting. Any neutral high-smoke-point fat browns the meat as well, though dripping carries more flavour. Two tablespoons is enough for 2 lb of meat.
- A pint, and what it holdsA pint here is a measure of volume, not weight: about 2 cups of parboiled potato pieces and 2 cups of shelled peas. Two cups of shelled peas is roughly 2 lb of peas in the pod, or one 10-oz bag frozen.
- Timing the simmer"Until very tender" for shoulder or breast means 1 1/2 to 2 hours at a bare simmer, lid on, liquid just trembling. Rushing it at a boil tightens the meat and clouds the gravy.
- Peas go in lastThe potatoes are already parboiled and need 15 minutes at most. Peas need 3 to 5 minutes, and frozen peas 2. Adding both at once, as the wording implies, turns the peas grey and mealy.
- SeasonThe recipe says only "season", with no salt or quantity specified. Salt the meat before flouring, and correct at the end once the barley has drawn liquid; a bay leaf and a few peppercorns in the pot are period-appropriate.
- YieldServes four generously as a one-pot supper. It reheats better than it eats fresh, the barley and potato having settled into the gravy overnight.
"Haricot" of mutton has nothing to do with haricot beans, despite generations of cooks assuming it did; the name is generally traced to the Old French harigoter, to cut up or shred, and the dish was known in English as "harigo" or "haricot" of mutton from at least the seventeenth century. It belongs with the plainer Lancashire hotpot and the Irish stew, all of them ways of making a cheap, bony, fatty cut worth eating by long wet cooking with whatever roots were in the house.