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Mutton Haricot
Remove the fat from the chops of a loin of mutton, put them into a fryingpan with two onions cut in slices, and fry until the meat is a light brown, put a little flour into a breakfast cupful of gravy to thicken it, pour it over the meat and cook slowly for about forty-five minutes. In the meantime put two carrots, two turnips, and a small head of celery into a saucepan of water and partly boil them; cut the vegetables in slices, add them to the pan with the meat and stew gently for twenty minutes longer; add two tablespoonfuls of mushroom catsup and one wineglassful of sherry wine, boil up quickly, pour it on to a dish, and serve.
A plain braise dressed up with sherry and mushroom catsup at the finish. Most of what needs translating is vocabulary and the meat itself.
- Mutton, and what to use insteadMutton is sheep over a year old, with firmer, stronger-flavoured meat than lamb; almost no American supermarket carries it. Lamb loin chops work but are far more tender, so treat the stated times as a maximum rather than a target. If you find true mutton, expect it to want an hour and a half or more of gentle cooking before it is tender.
- A breakfast cupfulRoughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces — a generous cup. The "gravy" here means brown stock or the strained juices from a previous roast, not a finished sauce; use good beef or lamb stock.
- A wineglassfulIn period cookbooks this is about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup, not a modern 6-oz pour. More sherry than that will dominate the dish.
- Mushroom catsupA thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquor, quite unlike tomato ketchup. It is still sold by British grocers; Worcestershire sauce or a spoonful of mushroom soy plus a dash of vinegar gives a comparable savoury lift. Add it at the end as directed — long boiling flattens it.
- The hinge: don't let it boil"Cook slowly" means a bare shiver at the surface, not a rolling boil. A hard boil will tighten the chops and leave them stringy no matter how long you cook them. Apart from parboiling the vegetables in their own pan of water, the only fast boil is the brief one at the end, to marry the sherry and catsup into the sauce.
- ThickeningWhisk the flour into the cold or cool stock before it goes near the pan, or work it into the fat left in the frying pan first. Tipping dry flour into hot liquid over the meat will give you lumps. A tablespoon of flour to the cup of stock is about right.
- Parboiling the vegetablesCarrots, turnips and celery go into water "partly boiled" — five to eight minutes, until barely yielding — because they finish in only twenty minutes with the meat. The instruction to slice them after boiling is easier reversed: cut first, then blanch.
- YieldA loin of mutton yields roughly six to eight chops, enough for four. Serve with boiled or mashed potatoes to take up the sauce.
Despite the name, a haricot of mutton contains no beans. The word is often linked, though the etymology is disputed, to the Old French harigoter, to cut up or shred, and the dish — chops browned with onion, moistened with stock, finished with root vegetables — appears in English cookbooks from the eighteenth century onward, in Glasse and after, with the French form arriving via translation; the bean sense of haricot is attested in English from the mid-seventeenth century, so the two senses run roughly alongside each other. Its presence in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is a reminder that the Waldorf's kitchen, for all its French menu cards, drew heavily on the domestic English repertoire that American households already knew. The two closing flourishes, mushroom catsup and sherry, are the Victorian signature: a bottled umami sauce and a fortified wine stirred in off the fire to give a plain stew the depth that a long-reduced demi-glace would have supplied in a grand restaurant kitchen.