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Irish Stew
After procuring a small neck of lamb, cut it into two-inch square pieces, then plunge them into slightly salted boiling water and boil fro five minutes; drain thoroughly, replace the lamb in the same pan and pour in sufficient hot water to cover the meat. Season with a tablespoon salt, one teaspoon white pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg.
Tie up together two well-cleaned leeks, two branches celery, two branches parsley, one sprig bay leaf and one sprig thyme. Cover the pan and let boil for ten minutes. Scoop out with a Parisian potato scoop two medium-sized red carrots, two sound, medium turnips and place with above. Skim the fat from the surface of the broth. Cover the pan and slowly boil for twenty minutes. Then add six small peeled, white onions and boil five minutes. Scoop out and add three medium, peeled, raw potatoes. Cover the pan and boil for fifteen minutes more. Remove the bouquet of herbs, carefully skim the fat from the surface. Dilute one ounce flour with half pint cold milk, pass it through a strainer into the stew. Mix lightly while cooking for two minutes. Pour into a hot, deep dish. Sprinkle over a teaspoon finely chopped parsley. Arrange six small dumplings around the dish and serve.
A French-trained version of the dish, written for a cook who owns a full batterie de cuisine and a stock of dumplings already made. Two things need attention before anything else: the cooking time is too short for neck of lamb, and the salt is roughly triple what most cooks now want.
- The timing is the weak pointThe written times add up to about 55 minutes of hard boiling. Neck of lamb is a collagen-rich cut that needs 1 to 1.5 hours at a bare simmer to become tender. Give the meat and herb bouquet an hour on its own, then add the root vegetables in the order given so each has 20 to 30 minutes, the onions and potatoes 15 to 20.
- Boil versus simmer"Slowly boil" here is probably best read as what we call a simmer: the surface barely moving. A rolling boil will shred the lamb and cloud the broth.
- A tablespoon of saltThat is roughly 18 g for a small neck and about 2 quarts of water. Start with a teaspoon and season at the end, after the vegetables have gone in and the liquid has reduced.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon. The white pepper and nutmeg quantities are otherwise as written.
- Parisian potato scoopA melon baller. The point is uniform spheres of carrot, turnip and potato that cook at the same rate and look neat in the dish; a knife-cut 3/4-inch dice does the same job. Note that three potatoes scooped into balls yields much less than three whole potatoes, so budget extra.
- Neck of lambAsk the butcher for neck or scrag end, bone in. Shoulder cut into 2-inch pieces is the closest common substitute. Lamb shoulder chops also work.
- The milk-and-flour finishOne ounce of flour is a scant quarter cup; half a pint is one cup of milk. Whisk them smooth, strain in to catch lumps, and give it a full two to three minutes of gentle cooking so the flour loses its raw taste. Add it off the boil to keep the milk from breaking.
- The dumplingsNo recipe is given here; the dumplings must be made separately. Steam them on top of the stew for the last 15 to 20 minutes, or cook them in a second pan of broth if you want the stew liquid clear.
- YieldFour servings as a main course, or six with bread and the dumplings.
Irish stew in its home form is a plain thing: mutton or lamb, onions, potatoes, water, salt and pepper, cooked long in one pot over turf. What appears here is that dish put through a professional French kitchen, which is exactly what "The International Cook Book" was for. The blanching of the meat, the tied bouquet of leek, celery, parsley, bay and thyme, the vegetables turned to spheres with a Parisian scoop, and the flour-and-milk liaison at the end are all restaurant technique of the Escoffier generation, applied to a peasant stew to make it presentable in a hot deep dish. The potato is central to the original because of its place in the Irish diet from the eighteenth century onward, and mutton rather than lamb would have been the usual meat, older animals being the ones that came to the pot. Purists have long argued about whether carrots belong in it at all; this version settles the question by adding turnips too.