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Scalloped Mutton
One pint of cold, chopped meat; onefourth teaspoon of pepper; one teaspoon of salt; one tablespoon of butter; one teaspoon of flour; one cup of water. Chop the meat rather coarsely, and add the salt and pepper. Heat the butter, and stir in the flour; when richly browned, add the water, and season the gravy thus made with salt and pepper. Arrange alternate layers of meat and gravy in a baking-dish, using three layers of gravy and two of mutton, thus ending with gravy. Cover the top with a slight sprinkling of bread crumbs, and bake twenty minutes in a hot oven. This dish may be prepared the day before, if needed for breakfast, and set in a cold place.
HAGGIS-To make haggis, the famous Scotch dish, proceed as follows: Carefully wash a lamb's head, heart, liver, kidneys and sweetbreads. Place the head, heart and liver in a kettle, cover with cold water, let them simmer for two hours, and set aside to cool. When they are cold, remove all fat and bones, and chop the meat rather fine. Parboil the sweetbreads, remove the tubes from the kidneys and add the breads to the hash; then add one grated onion, two tablespoons of chopped parsley, and salt and pepper to taste. Heat the mixture over a moderate fire, being careful not to stir too much. When ready to serve, add one gill of good cream, and turn out the preparation upon the center of a platter. Place the sweetbreads, browned in butter, on top, and serve with brown bread.
Two recipes share this entry: a layered leftover-meat bake, and a soft, anglicised version of haggis that owes more to a lamb hash than to anything boiled in a stomach bag. Both assume you already have cooked meat on hand.
- Hot oven"A hot oven" in this period means somewhere in the region of 400-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat is enough to brown the crumbs and heat the assembled dish through, since nothing in it is raw.
- A pint of chopped meatMeasured by volume, not weight: 2 cups, which for coarsely chopped cooked meat is roughly 10-12 oz off the bone. It makes a small dish, two to three servings, and reads as a way of using up a cold joint.
- MuttonTrue mutton, from a mature sheep (variously reckoned from a year old, more often two), is sold now mainly by halal butchers and specialist farms. Cold roast leg or shoulder of lamb behaves the same way here; if you use lamb, taste before adding the full teaspoon of salt.
- The gravy is very thinOne teaspoon of flour to one tablespoon of butter and a full cup of water gives a barely thickened brown sauce, which is the point -- it has to soak into the meat rather than sit on it. Brown the roux properly, to the colour of dark toast, or the finished dish tastes of raw flour and water. A well-flavoured stock in place of the water improves it more than extra flour would.
- LayeringThree thin layers of gravy to two of meat, gravy last, so the crumbs sit on liquid and crisp rather than dry out. Use a shallow dish; a deep one leaves the centre cool after twenty minutes.
- Made the day beforeThe instruction to "set in a cold place" means the refrigerator now, and no more than a day. Cooked meat in gravy held at room temperature is exactly the wrong thing; chill it uncovered until cold, then cover.
- A gill of creamA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. The recipe adds it at the end, when ready to serve; keep the heat low so it warms through without splitting.
- The haggis is not haggisThere is no oatmeal, no suet and no casing here, so expect a loose, creamy mince rather than a sliceable pudding. Sweetbreads and kidneys both want a soak in cold water and a change of water before parboiling; the "tubes" to be removed are the fat core and ureters of the kidney.
- Sourcing a lamb's headWhole heads are a special order from a butcher in most places and are absent from supermarket counters entirely. Heart and liver alone, simmered the same two hours, give a workable version of the mixture.
"Scalloped" here is the older sense of the word -- generally traced to a dish built in layers and finished with crumbs, cooked originally in a scallop shell -- rather than anything to do with a modern potato gratin. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, aimed its cook books at households running on a fixed budget, and this is a textbook second-day recipe: a cold joint, a spoonful of butter and a cup of water turned into a hot breakfast dish that can be assembled the night before. Mutton was still an ordinary roasting meat of the period, which is why a book like this could assume a pint of it left over. The haggis appended to it shows what happened to Scottish dishes as they travelled into American general-purpose cookery: the pluck and the head are still there, but the oatmeal, the suet and the sheep's stomach casing that define haggis in Scotland have gone, replaced by cream and a platter garnish of browned sweetbreads.