Home › The World's Kitchen › Hashed Mutton with Green Peppers
Hashed Mutton with Green Peppers
Cut away all the meat from leg of mutton left over from yesterday, remove fat and cut meat into exceedingly small square pieces. Cut also in same shape, two cold, boiled, peeled, medium potatoes.
Heat a tablespoon melted butter in saucepan, add one finely chopped onion, one large, seeded, chopped green pepper and fry for five minutes, stirring well meanwhile. Add the mutton and potatoes, season with a light teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg. Moisten with a pint of broth, mix well, cover the pan, cook on fire for five minutes, then set in oven for forty-five minutes, stirring once in a while. Remove, dress the hash on a hot, deep dish, arrange six heart-shaped bread croutons around, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A leftover-roast hash of the kind that anchored midweek cooking when a leg of mutton fed a household for days. The original assumes you already have cold cooked meat and potatoes on hand.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is usually reckoned as a quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons of pepper is thus about three-quarters of a teaspoon, which is assertive for a pint of broth; the nutmeg is a quarter teaspoon.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven description at all. A moderate oven, around 325-350F, with the pan kept covered will hold the liquid at a slow simmer rather than boiling it away.
- The liquid is the pointA pint of broth over that little meat looks like a great deal. Covered, it will reduce only slowly in the oven; if it still looks soupy after the forty-five minutes, finish it uncovered on the stovetop for a few minutes.
- MuttonTrue mutton, from a sheep over a year old, is rare in American markets. Cold roast lamb shoulder or leg is the direct substitute; the strong seasoning here was designed to meet mutton's gaminess, so with lamb you may want slightly less pepper.
- Trim ruthlesslyThe instruction to remove the fat matters more with mutton than with beef, since mutton fat sets hard and waxy when the dish cools. Cut the meat small, roughly a quarter-inch dice, so it disperses instead of sitting in lumps.
- Green pepperOne large bell pepper, seeds and white ribs removed. Five minutes in butter with the onion is enough to soften it without browning; the long oven time finishes it.
- CroutonsSlices of firm white bread cut with a heart-shaped cutter or a knife, then fried in butter until crisp. Fry them at the end so they are still crisp when the hash goes to the table.
- YieldExpect three to four modern portions from the meat off a leftover leg.
Hash is the pure economy of the joint-roasting household: a leg of mutton is often said to have gone to table hot on Sunday, cold on Monday, and minced with onion and potato on Tuesday. The instruction to use meat "left over from yesterday" is not an aside but the whole premise, and it is generally held to explain why so many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbooks carry numerous hash variants. Sweet capsicums were long treated in Anglo-American cooking as a Spanish, Creole or Hungarian ingredient rather than a staple. The heart-shaped croutons are the other tell: a plain reheated dish was still expected to arrive at the table dressed, with a border and a scatter of parsley, in the borrowed vocabulary of the restaurant kitchen.