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Lamb Hash with Green Peppers
Detach and cut into very small square pieces all the meat from the remaining leg of lamb of yesterday. Have the same quantity cooked potatoes, chopped the same as the lamb, and mix together. Melt an ounce butter in a small pan, and one medium, sound and finely chopped onion and a medium, finely chopped green pepper.
Mix well until they obtain a good golden colour. Add the lamb and potatoes. Pour in half pint hot broth or hot water and two tablespoons tomato sauce. Season with three-quarters of a teaspoon salt, half a light teaspoon white pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix all well together and let cook on a brisk fire for ten minutes, stirring once in a while. Place the pan in a hot oven for fifteen minutes. Remove, dress on a hot dish, and serve with six bread croutons around the dish.
A leftover-lamb dish from the era when a roast leg was expected to feed a household twice. The proportions are loose because the yield depends on what is left on the bone; work by the one-to-one rule of meat to potato.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A "light teaspoon" of white pepper means a scant one, not a heaped one.
- Half pintOne cup (US measure). The mixture should be moist but not soupy going into the oven.
- Hot ovenRoughly 400-450F; the book gives no temperatures. Fifteen minutes at that heat browns the top. Use an ovenproof skillet or transfer to a shallow gratin dish.
- Brisk fireMedium-high heat on the stovetop. The ten minutes there is to reduce the liquid and let the potato start to break down and bind the hash.
- Tomato sauceNot the American pasta sauce of today; in a book of this vintage it is likely to mean a cooked, fairly plain tomato sauce or puree. Canned tomato puree or passata is a reasonable stand-in, and two tablespoons of ketchup would be noticeably sweeter.
- Cut, do not grindThe instruction to cut the meat into very small squares matters. Ground or shredded lamb turns pasty in a hash of this kind; hand-cut dice keep their texture through the oven stage.
- The lamb is already cookedEverything here is reheating, so judge doneness by the crust and by the liquid having reduced, not by time. Overcooking dries the lamb without improving anything.
- CroutonsThe recipe doesn't specify their form; croutons of this period were commonly bread fried in butter. Arrange them around the edge after the dish leaves the oven or they will soften.
- YieldDepends on the leftovers, but a pound of cooked lamb with an equal weight of potato serves four.
This is a page out of the logic of the thrifty household: the Sunday leg of lamb appears roasted, then as hash, and the cookbook treats the sequence as so obvious that the recipe simply opens with "the remaining leg of lamb of yesterday." What marks it as belonging to a book called The International Cook Book is the seasoning: a saltspoon of nutmeg, which pulls a plain English hash toward the Continental kitchen where nutmeg in a meat dish was routine. Green bell peppers are often said to have been less familiar in the British tradition than in Hungarian and Spanish cooking, and their appearance in a leftovers dish suggests how readily they were absorbed. The fried croutons ringing the platter are the era's standard finish for anything soft and brown, a piece of table presentation that survives now mostly in restaurant garnish.