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LAMB AND MUTTON (Season with salt pepper)
Season with salt, pepper, and a very little curry powder, if liked. While the stew is heating, boil one-half cup of well-washed rice. When tender, put into a hot vegetable dish, hollow the center, and turn in the stew. Serve at once.
This is the tail end of a longer entry — the stew itself was described in the lines above, and what survives here is the seasoning and the rice border. Treat it as a method for finishing any leftover lamb or mutton stew rather than a standalone recipe.
- What the stew isAssume roughly 2 cups diced cooked lamb or mutton reheated in about a cup of gravy or stock, thickened lightly. Anything of that consistency will work.
- Reheat, do not re-cookThe meat is already cooked. Bring the gravy to a simmer, add the lamb, and give it only long enough to heat through — five minutes at most. Longer and mutton in particular turns stringy and dry.
- Half a cup of riceThat is half a cup raw, yielding about a cup and a half cooked — enough to ring a dish for two. Long-grain rice needs about 15 minutes; the "well-washed" instruction matters less with modern packaged rice but rinsing still gives a drier, less sticky border.
- "Vegetable dish"A serving dish from a dinner service rather than a casserole; these came both open and covered. Warm it first: rice cools very fast when spread thin, and the whole point of the arrangement is that it reaches the table hot.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powder of this period was generally mild and turmeric-heavy, used more as a background seasoning than as a flavour in its own right. A quarter teaspoon stirred into the hot gravy is in the spirit of "a very little"; bloom it in the fat first if you want it to taste of anything.
- ServingOn the quantities assumed above it makes about two servings. Doubling is straightforward — a cup of raw rice and a correspondingly doubled quantity of stew fills a large platter.
Books of this kind proliferated from the 1890s through the First World War, when the roast joint was the centrepiece of the middle-class Sunday table and the cook was expected to account for every scrap of it through the week. Mutton — meat from a sheep over two years old, strong-flavoured and far more common on British and American tables then than now — reheated badly and needed help. The ring of rice around a hollowed centre was a standard presentation trick of the period, generally traced to the French *bordure de riz*, and it did honest work as well as decorative — it stretched a small quantity of meat and soaked up gravy that would otherwise pool.