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Mutton Hash, Colbert
Pick all the meat off mutton left over from yesterday, cut it in small square pieces, and add half the quantity finely chopped cold boiled potatoes. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in frying pan, add a finely chopped each onion and seeded green pepper and gently brown for five minutes. Add mutton and potatoes, season with a teaspoon grated nutmeg, pour in two gills broth, a gill demi-glace, mix well, cover pan and set in oven for fifty minutes. Remove, dress hash to a dome-shaped hot dish, lightly flatten top, sprinkle a teaspoon freshly chopped parsley over and serve.
A leftover-mutton hash finished in the oven, in the French service style Alexandre Filippini favoured. Two of the measurements need adjusting before you cook.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. Two gills of broth is one cup; a gill of demi-glace is half a cup, so the pan holds about a cup and a half of liquid. The recipe does not say how much meat yesterday's mutton yields.
- The nutmeg is a slipA whole teaspoon of grated nutmeg will overwhelm the dish and taste medicinal. A quarter teaspoon, or a few scrapes over the pan, is the useful amount.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given and no oven term is used; a moderate oven, somewhere around 350F, is a reasonable reading. Fifty minutes is long for meat that is already cooked — check at thirty and pull the pan when the liquid has thickened and clings, before the mutton dries out.
- Demi-glaceClassically a reduction of brown stock and espagnole sauce. A commercial demi-glace concentrate or a half cup of well-reduced brown stock will do the same job, which is to give the hash body so it holds a dome on the plate.
- MuttonTrue mutton — sheep over a year, often much older — is rare outside halal and specialty butchers. Leftover roast leg or shoulder of lamb behaves the same way here, though it is milder and needs less nutmeg still.
- Potato proportionHalf the quantity of the meat; the recipe does not say whether by weight or by volume of chopped pieces. Cold boiled potatoes are specified for a reason: they hold their cubes, where freshly boiled ones break down more readily.
- PanUse an ovenproof skillet and move the whole thing to the oven. Browning the onion and pepper in a tablespoon of butter for five minutes should soften them without colour beyond pale gold.
Dishes labelled à la Colbert in nineteenth-century French cookery generally take their name from Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister, though the connection to any particular preparation is culinary tradition rather than documented fact. The name is most often attached to sole Colbert and to beurre Colbert, a maitre d'hotel butter with meat glaze and tarragon — and it is the meat glaze, here the gill of demi-glace, that probably earns this hash its title. The recipe belongs to a large family of Victorian and Edwardian leftover dishes: a household roasting a joint of mutton on Sunday expected to see it again on Monday, and the cookbook's job was to make the return appearance look deliberate. Dressing the hash into a dome and flattening the top is pure restaurant service, a way of presenting yesterday's meat with enough ceremony that no one at the table need remark on its origins.