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Spanish Stew
Melt two tablespoonfuls of butter, slice two small onions, and mix with two cups of chopped meat, not fine. The meat may be all lamb or a mixture of lamb and beef. Brown all together in the butter. Add one teaspoonful of flour, four medium-sized tomatoes, one tablespoonful Chili sauce, one seeded red pepper, cut fine, one tablespoonful salt, and two cups of stock. Cover and let simmer until well blended and thickened. Serve on a platter and garnish with radishes and parsley.
A quick skillet stew built on cooked meat, meant to use up the remains of a roast leg or shoulder. Two things need attention: the salt, and the fact that everything in the pan is already cooked.
- The tablespoon of saltOne tablespoon of salt against two cups of meat and two cups of stock is far more than modern palates accept, especially with a salted stock and Chili sauce already in the pot. Start with a teaspoon and correct at the end.
- The meat is already cookedThe meat may or may not be cooked -- The recipe does not say. If you are working from chopped roast lamb, it only needs to heat through and take on colour: twenty to thirty minutes of gentle simmering is enough for the sauce to blend and thicken, and a long simmer will leave it stringy and dry. Raw chopped meat will want longer.
- "Chopped, not fine""Chopped meat, not fine" -- Aim for rough half-inch pieces cut by hand. A food processor will reduce lamb, cooked especially, to paste and the stew loses all its texture.
- One teaspoon of flourThat is a very light hand — this is a thin, glossy sauce rather than a gravy. If you want more body, let it reduce uncovered for the last ten minutes rather than adding more flour.
- Chili sauceThe period product is the sweet, thick tomato-and-vinegar bottled sauce sold beside ketchup, not a hot pepper sauce. Ketchup with a splash of vinegar is a fair substitute.
- The seeded red pepperAmbiguous in the original: it may mean a fresh sweet red pepper or a dried red chile. Seeded and "cut fine" alongside a separate Chili sauce suggests a dried chile pod; half a small fresh red chile gives a similar effect.
- TomatoesFour medium fresh tomatoes are roughly a pound, or about a 14-oz tin of chopped tomatoes with their juice out of season.
- YieldServes three to four with rice, potatoes or bread. The recipe finishes it on a platter garnished with radishes and parsley.
The label "Spanish" in American cookbooks of this era rarely signals Spain: through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries American cookery writers used it loosely for anything built on tomatoes, onions and red pepper, the same convention that gave us Spanish rice and Spanish omelet. The bottled Chili sauce is a period marker of its own -- a commercially manufactured tomato condiment that was widely sold in the United States by the end of the century, and one that let a home cook add sweetness, vinegar and spice from a single bottle. Thrift cookery of this kind, in which a large joint was expected to reappear in a second dish, was a staple of American domestic writing either side of 1900.