Home › Left-Over Lamb and Mutton › Oriental Stew
Oriental Stew
Simmer gently together 2 cups of cold lamb I chopped onion or mutton cut in cubes 1 cup of water tablespoonfuls of butter sliced 2 small cold potatoes, 1 cup of cooked peas or cooked string beans chopped
A quick skillet stew built on yesterday's roast, held together by a little butter and a cup of water rather than a made sauce. The whole point is to warm the meat through, not to cook it again.
- Reading the quantitiesThe workable proportions are 2 cups cold cooked lamb or mutton in cubes, 1 chopped onion, 1 cup water, 2 small cold potatoes sliced, and 1 cup cooked peas or chopped string beans. The butter has lost its number in the printing, though the plural "tablespoonfuls" implies at least two; two tablespoons suits this volume.
- The hinge: do not boil the meatThe recipe says to simmer everything gently together, but already-cooked lamb toughens and dries fast in liquid. Better to sweat the onion in the butter first, add the water and potatoes, and only slide the meat in for the last five minutes at a bare simmer.
- Vegetables go in lastThe peas or beans are already cooked. Two or three minutes at the end is enough; longer and the peas turn grey and the beans go limp.
- Mutton versus lambMutton, meat from a sheep over a year old, is strongly flavoured and rarely sold in supermarkets now. Leftover leg or shoulder of lamb behaves the same way here, though the dish will taste milder.
- Where the seasoning wentNo salt, pepper or spice is specified, and a cup of plain water dilutes what flavour the meat has. Season at the end, and consider using leftover gravy or stock in place of some of the water.
- "Oriental" in name onlyBeyond the onion there is no spice or aromatic in the list at all. If you want the title to mean something, a teaspoon of curry powder bloomed in the butter with the onion would be one plausible period reading.
- YieldServes two to three as a main course, more if you put it over rice or toast.
Books of left-overs were a small publishing genre either side of 1900, when a joint of meat was the anchor of the week's meals and throwing food away was a moral failing as much as an economic one. Cold roast lamb or mutton was the most reliably recurring surplus in a middle-class kitchen, which is why it gets its own chapter here. The label "Oriental" seems to have been applied loosely in cookery of the period to almost anything stewed, curried or merely mixed, and often turns up, as here, on dishes with no discernible connection to any cuisine east of Dover "a bit of vocabulary that says more about the marketing of home cooking than about the food itself.