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Beef or Mutton Scalloped
546. Chop some mutton or beef very fine, adding some good broth or gravy, with some walnut ketchup and a little Worcestershire sauce poured upon it, and pepper, salt, and chopped pickle, mixed with the meat. Put it in scallop-shells; then grate some bread, and strew thickly over it; brown it nicely, and serve quite hot. Mutton is the best meat for the purpose, and must be well moistened with the broth.
A Victorian way with cold roast meat: minced, moistened, seasoned sharply, crumbed and browned. The recipe gives no quantities, so the proportions are yours to judge.
- The meat is already cookedThe recipe does not say so outright, but the brief browning and the dish's place among Victorian ways with cold joints point to cooked meat: cold roast mutton or beef, chopped fine by hand or pulsed briefly in a processor. Raw mince is unlikely to work here, as it releases water and the mixture goes loose.
- Moisture is the hingeThe note that mutton "must be well moistened with the broth" is the whole recipe. Cold roast meat is dry, and the browning stage drives off more. Aim for a mixture that slumps rather than mounds — roughly 4 tablespoons of stock or gravy to every 2 cups of chopped meat, adjusted by eye.
- Scallop-shellsReal shells, used as individual dishes and common kitchen equipment in the period. Ramekins, small gratin dishes or a shallow pie plate all serve; the point is a wide surface for the crumb crust.
- Walnut ketchupA thin, dark, salty condiment of pickled green walnuts, unrelated to tomato ketchup. It survives from a few British makers. Mushroom ketchup is the closest substitute; a little anchovy essence or soy plus a splash of vinegar gets you to the same savoury-sour place.
- Chopped pickleMixed pickles or piccalilli from the household jar, chopped small. Cornichons, pickled onion or a spoonful of chow-chow do the same job — the acid is there to cut mutton fat, so do not leave it out.
- "Grate some bread"Dry breadcrumbs made by grating a stale loaf, coarser and drier than commercial crumbs. Panko is a reasonable stand-in. Dot the top with butter before browning or the crumbs scorch without colouring.
- Browning itThe recipe only says 'brown it nicely'. Browning of this kind was commonly done with a salamander — an iron plate heated in the fire and held over the dish. Use a broiler about 4 inches from the element for 3–5 minutes, or a hot oven at 425F for 12–15 minutes, until the crumbs are deep gold and the filling bubbles at the edges.
- YieldAbout 2 cups of chopped meat fills four scallop shells or ramekins as a first course, or two as a light supper with a green salad.
Scalloped dishes appear to take their name from the shell they were served in rather than from any cutting technique; by the eighteenth century 'in scallops' or 'scalloped' was used of savoury mixtures baked with a crumb topping in shells. The recipe belongs to the large Victorian literature of what to do with cold joints: a household that roasted a leg of mutton on Sunday had it to answer for on Tuesday, and the bottled sauces of the period were the answer. Walnut ketchup was one of the oldest of these, in use in Britain well before tomato ketchup, while Lea & Perrins had been selling Worcestershire sauce commercially since the late 1830s.