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Lamb En Casserole
Cut thick slices from a leg of lamb and sear in an iron frying-pan, browning both sides. Brush with melted butter and place in casserole with a little brown stock. When tender, add balls of potato and carrot which have been previously cooked, also a dozen small cooked onions. Add more brown stock, three tablespoons of sherry or Madeira wine, salt, pepper and paprika.
A brief, telegraphic recipe of the sort the Butterick book assumes you can fill in from experience. The gaps worth closing are the oven temperature, the liquid level, and the order in which the vegetables go in.
- The hinge: the vegetables are already cookedPotato balls, carrot balls and the small onions all go in cooked, near the end, purely to heat through and take up the sauce. Add them raw at the start and they collapse into the stock long before the lamb slices are tender.
- "Casserole" hereMost likely a lidded earthenware or glazed baking dish rather than a saucepan or a modern layered bake, though this page does not say so outright and does not mention an oven. A Dutch oven or any heavy covered casserole will serve.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; numbered oven settings were not yet standard in books of this date. If you cook it covered in the oven, a modern equivalent is around 325F, with the liquid barely trembling. Slices from the leg will want roughly 45 minutes to 1 1/2 hours depending on thickness.
- Thickness of the slices"thick" is not defined; something in the region of 1 to 1 1/2 inches, cut across the muscle, suits a braise. Thin cutlets sear well but dry out.
- Brown stockA dark veal or beef stock, the bones roasted first. Any good unsalted beef or lamb stock does the job; season at the end, since it reduces. "A little" is not quantified: enough to keep the casserole moist, with more added when the vegetables go in.
- The wineThree tablespoons of sherry or Madeira go in at the very end, with the seasoning. It is a finishing note rather than a braising liquid, so give it only a few minutes of heat to lose its raw edge.
- Potato and carrot ballsCut with a melon baller, or simply pare small even chunks. Boil them separately just to tenderness and keep them cool until needed.
- Yield and servingNo yield is given; the dozen small onions suggest something in the range of four to six. The sauce stays thin, so serve it in shallow bowls or rimmed plates; a small kneaded butter-and-flour ball whisked in will lightly bind it if you prefer.
The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911, during a long American vogue for cooking "en casserole," a fashion drawn from French practice and encouraged by the availability of new heatproof earthenware; borosilicate glass ovenware followed a few years later. The appeal was economy dressed as elegance: a covered dish took tough, cheap or leftover cuts, cooked them slowly in stock, and came to table in the vessel it was cooked in. The neat balls of potato and carrot and the dozen small onions belong to the garnish vocabulary of the professional French kitchen, where such shapes signalled care; the spoonfuls of sherry or Madeira do similar work, lifting a plain braise of leg of lamb into something to set before guests. Paprika, listed here almost as a matter of course, was by then well established in American cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s, valued for the colour it gave a pale sauce as much as for its flavour.