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Minced Mutton
Remove all the fat, skin and gristle from some cold cooked mutton, chop it up very fine, and pour over Italian sauce in the proportion of one pint of sauce to every pound of meat. Warm up thoroughly, without boiling in a saucepan, over a clear fire. Turn it out onto a dish and garnish with poached eggs or pieces of fried bread, and serve very hot.
Neck of Mutton, Brittany Style Chop off the chine bones and scrags of two necks of mutton, trim them to a nice shape, and roast in a hot oven, keeping them well basted. Put one pint of white beans to soak in water over night, drain and put in a saucepan with fresh water, one ounce of butter and a lump of salt; boil until tender. As the beans will require much longer cooking than the mutton, they should be put over the fire some length of time before. Peel and thinly slice three large onions, put them in a stewpan with a lump of butter or clarified fat, and fry until nicely browned, dredge a small quantity of flour over, and pour in two breakfast cupfuls of clear gravy. Stir the sauce over the fire until it boils, put in the beans with a piece of glaze the size of a walnut, season to taste with salt and pepper, and stir until the glaze has dissolved. Place the mutton on a hot dish, pour the sauce around, and serve.
Stewed Neck of Mutton, Duchess Style Select a whole neck of mutton with the scrag end attached, weighing about three pounds, wash it well, sprinkle with flour and fry in a frying-pan until well browned. Put it in a saucepan with sufficient stock to cover, and add a carrot, two turnips and six small onions. Cover closely and cook slowly until the vegetables are thoroughly done; remove the vegetables, place them on a dish and keep warm. Continue to cook the mutton until done, which will take about four to five hours altogether. When done remove to a dish and keep hot. Let the gravy in the pan cool, remove the fat, and then reduce it quickly to about one pint; thicken with one tablespoonful of flour mixed smooth with two tablespoonfuls of stock. Put in the meat again and cook slowly for thirty minutes. Chop up the vegetables, put them into a saucepan with a little butter, toss over the fire until they are quite hot, and arrange on a dish in small piles around the mutton. Other cooked vegetables may be used as a garnish if desired.
Mutton on Skewers Cut a leg or loin of mutton into small, equal-sized pieces, rub them over with finely-chopped onion, salt and pepper, lay them on a plate, place another on top, and leave them for a few hours. Cut a pound of tomatoes into halves, put them in a mortar and press them to extract the juice, which pass through a fine hair sieve. Place the pieces of meat on skewers, put them over a brisk fire and turn them often so as to brown evenly, basting them with the tomato juice. When they are cooked lay them on a hot dish, and serve very hot. If fresh tomatoes are not in season take about one teacupful of the liquor of canned ones, strain it through a fine hair sieve to free it of all pips, and mix it with one breakfast cupful of water.
This entry is really a run of four mutton dishes printed without breaks, all of them leaning on the hotel kitchen's standing stocks and sauces. Mutton itself is the first hurdle: most American butchers sell only lamb, and lamb shoulder or leg will stand in throughout, cooking faster and tasting milder.
- Italian sauceNot a tomato sauce. In this period it means sauce italienne: a brown sauce (demi-glace) finished with a duxelles of finely chopped mushrooms and shallots, chopped ham, white wine and herbs. A pint to a pound of meat gives a very loose hash; half that is closer to modern taste.
- The hinge in the minced mutton"Warm up thoroughly, without boiling" is the whole instruction. Already-cooked mutton that is boiled in sauce goes dry and grainy, and the sauce breaks. Bring it to a bare steam and hold it there.
- GlazeA "piece of glaze the size of a walnut" is meat glace, stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm. A tablespoon of commercial demi-glace concentrate does the same job; without it, reduce a cup of strong brown stock to a couple of spoonfuls.
- Cup measuresA breakfast cupful is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz, a teacupful nearer 6. The book is not precise about either, so treat the bean-and-onion sauce as something to judge by consistency rather than volume.
- Chine bones and scragThe chine is the spinal section along the rack; the scrag is the bony upper neck. Ask for the rack chined and the neck kept on, or buy a rack already frenched and use neck slices separately for the stew.
- Oven and fireThe book gives no temperatures. 'Hot oven' for roasting the necks is conventionally read as somewhere around 425 to 450F. 'A clear fire' and 'a brisk fire' both mean a bright, well-burnt bed with no smoke or flare-up, which on a modern range means a hot burner or a settled grill bed.
- Four to five hoursThat figure belongs to old mutton on a coal range. Lamb neck is tender in about two hours at a low simmer, and the extra thirty minutes in the finished gravy is worth keeping for flavour.
- Skewers and tomatoThe mortar-and-hair-sieve routine is just seedless tomato juice; a blender and a fine strainer replace it. Marinating pressed between two plates for a few hours belongs in the refrigerator, and basting acidic juice onto a hot grill will char it, so brush during the last few minutes.
- YieldNone is given. The minced mutton serves three or four with eggs or fried bread; two necks Brittany style serve four to six; the three-pound stewed neck serves four.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria, and his 1896 Cook Book is less a home manual than a transcript of a large professional kitchen, which is why these entries assume a pot of brown sauce, a stock kettle and a jar of glaze always within reach. Mutton, meaning sheep slaughtered past a year old, was still ordinary hotel and household meat in the 1890s; American appetite for it collapsed over the following half-century in favour of young lamb, so a page that offers four mutton dishes in a row now reads as a period marker. "Brittany style" is the anglicising of \which in classical French usage means simply the presence of white haricot beans with onion and brown sauce, a pairing generally traced to the bean-growing districts around Brittany and long since fixed to leg and neck of mutton. "Duchess style" is looser, attached to any number of garnishes; here it means nothing more than the neat small piles of chopped carrot, turnips and onions set around the meat.