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Lamb Hash, Chipolata
Pick all the meat off leg of lamb left over from yesterday and cut it in very small square pieces, cut also in same shape three boiled potatoes, and keep both on a plate. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in saucepan add one finely chopped onion, one seeded, chopped green pepper, and brown for five minutes. Add lamb and potatoes, our in one gill broth and two gills demi-glace, season with a half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well, cover pan and set in oven for forty-five minutes, then bring it to oven door.
Prickle six country sausages with a fork, arrange on a double broiler and broil four minutes on each side. Dress hash dome-like on a hot dish, arrange sausages on top crosswise, decorate all around with six heart-shaped croutons and serve.
A leftover-lamb dish built on demi-glace, from the era when a cook had brown sauce standing by. The success of it rests on the sauce, not the meat.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so this is 1/2 cup broth and 1 cup demi-glace. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, giving 1/2 tsp pepper and 1/4 tsp grated nutmeg.
- Demi-glaceThe hinge of the dish. Reduced brown veal stock, either homemade or a good commercial concentrate diluted to sauce consistency; bouillon cube water will give a thin, salty hash. If you substitute, hold back the half teaspoon of salt until you have tasted.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all. Treat it as a moderate oven, around 350F, with the pan covered so the sauce reduces slowly rather than catching.
- Cut sizeSmall dice, perhaps 1/4 inch, on both lamb and potato. Cold boiled potatoes hold their shape better over the forty-five minutes than freshly boiled ones.
- "Country sausages"Small fresh pork links, not smoked or cured. Six modern breakfast links suit the scale; broiling four minutes a side will brown them, but check that they reach 160F.
- Pricking"Prickle with a fork" keeps the casings from bursting under the broiler. Do it lightly, in two or three places, or the fat runs out and the sausages dry.
- CroutonsCut from crustless white bread with a heart cutter and fried in clarified butter until crisp. They are structural as much as decorative, giving something to scoop the hash with.
- YieldThe meat off one leftover leg with three potatoes and six sausages serves three to four as a main course.
"Chipolata" in classical French kitchen language names a garnish rather than a sauce: chipolata sausages, small fresh pork links, arranged over or around a braise, often with glazed chestnuts, onions and lardons. The word comes from the Italian cipollata, an onion dish, and by the nineteenth century had drifted in French usage to mean the little sausage itself, which is what the term still means in Britain and France today. Its presence here, on a hash made from yesterday's roast leg, shows what a book like this was for: it takes the vocabulary of the professional kitchen and applies it to the domestic problem of leftovers, so that the cold Sunday joint arrives at the table with a French name, a brown sauce and a garnish of croutons cut into hearts. Demi-glace made this possible, since a household that kept a stockpot going could dress up almost anything.