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Butter (Meat cut in small pieces Into)
Meat cut in small pieces Into a buttered baking-dish, holding about a quart, put a layer of bread-crumbs, then a layer of meat, seasoning and adding a little grated onion. Repeat until the dish is nearly full. Add tomatoes, or a tablespoonful of tomato catsup, or a little lemon-juice. Cover with a layer of crumbs.
Pour the gravy, thinned with hot water, into the dish until it can just be seen. Put bits of butter over the top, and bake in a moderate oven from one-half to three-quarters of an hour. Increase
A scalloped dish for cooked lamb or mutton, built in layers and moistened with leftover gravy. The text as printed runs off mid-sentence at "Increase" — the missing line almost certainly concerned increasing the quantities for a larger dish.
- The hinge: liquid level"Pour the gravy... until it can just be seen" is the whole technique. The crumbs should be damp throughout but not swimming; liquid visible at the edge of the dish when you tilt it is right. Too little and the meat dries to leather, too much and the top will not crisp.
- Moderate ovenConventionally rendered as roughly 350F / 175C. The reference to existing gravy implies the meat is already cooked, so the bake is largely to heat through and brown the top.
- Quart baking-dishAbout 1 litre; a small gratin dish. That makes a two- to three-person supper from cold cooked meat.
- Bread-crumbsPeriod recipes of this kind usually meant dried, stale bread grated fine rather than soft fresh crumb (and certainly not packaged panko). Dry crumbs absorb the gravy and hold the layers; fresh ones tend to collapse to paste.
- Trim the fatCold fat sets hard and tastes strongly when reheated. Cut the cold meat small, as directed, and discard the fat and gristle rather than chopping them in.
- The acid is not optionalThe recipe requires one of tomato, catsup or lemon juice, all serving to cut the richness of reheated meat. Tomato catsups of the period were generally thinner and sharper than modern ketchup, so a tablespoon of ketchup plus a squeeze of lemon may be closer to the intent.
- If you have no gravyWarm stock with a knob of butter whisked in will do. Straight water leaves the dish flat.
- TimingThe recipe allows a half to three-quarters of an hour; the shorter end will likely suffice if the meat and gravy go in warm, the longer if the dish is assembled cold. Brown the top under the broiler for a minute at the end if it is still pale.
Cook books of left-overs were a distinct genre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a Sunday joint fed a household for several days and refrigeration meant a cool larder or an icebox. Cold mutton and lamb were among the less appealing remains, since the fat congeals unpleasantly -- hence the shelf of recipes that chop such meat small, bury it in crumbs and acid, and send it back to the oven. The layered crumb-and-meat construction was generally called a scallop, a name usually traced to the shell dishes such mixtures were once baked in, and the same formula appears across the period applied to fish, oysters, chicken and ham. The instruction to add 'a little grated onion' rather than chopped is characteristic of the period.