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Mutton Hash, Singapore
Finely hash all the mutton left over from the day before yesterday. Peel, core and cut into very small dice pieces two good-sized green apples. Place in a small pan one finely chopped green pepper, one finely chopped white onion with one and a half tablespoons melted butter and cook to a nice light brown colour, lightly stirring meanwhile; add half teaspoon curry powder, gently stir; then add the mutton, half ounce lean grated (rasped) ham, the apples and half pint hot white broth. Season with two saltspoons salt and two saltspoons white pepper; mix all gently together and let cook for twenty minutes, lightly mixing with a wooden spoon meanwhile. Dress on a hot, deep dish and serve.
A leftover-mutton hash dressed up with curry powder, apple and a little ham. The measurements are period shorthand, and the meat is assumed to be already cooked.
- Start with cooked meat"All the mutton left over from the day before yesterday" means cold roast mutton, not raw. The recipe gives no weight; something in the region of a pound of cooked meat suits the other quantities. Lamb shoulder or leg stands in perfectly well if mutton is not available.
- Saltspoons and half pintsA saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, so two of each gives 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon white pepper. Half a pint of broth is 1 cup (US measure); the book is American, so this is 8 fl oz rather than the 10 fl oz imperial half-pint.
- White brothThis is an unsalted light stock — veal, chicken or the mutton bones themselves — not a brown gravy. Use a mild chicken stock and taste before adding the full 1/2 teaspoon of salt, since modern stocks are usually salted already.
- Grated hamHalf an ounce comes to a tablespoon or two once rasped, taken from a firm dry ham such as prosciutto or country ham. It is a seasoning, not a meat component; a moist supermarket sandwich ham will not rasp and adds little.
- Bloom the curry powderThe half teaspoon of curry goes into the buttered onion and pepper before any liquid, and only for a moment. That short contact with hot fat is what keeps commercial curry powder from tasting raw and dusty in the finished hash.
- The applesGreen means tart and firm — Granny Smith or similar. Cut them very small as directed; large dice collapse over twenty minutes and the hash turns to applesauce.
- Twenty minutes is rightThe meat is already cooked, so the time is there to reduce the cup of broth to a coating consistency and soften the apple. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir gently; hard boiling shreds the hash.
- Yield and servingEnough for about four in the deep dish the recipe calls for, depending on how much mutton was left over. Plain boiled rice suits the curry.
Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, filled The International Cook Book with hundreds of dishes tagged to cities and countries, and the tags are best read as menu-French geography rather than ethnography: "Singapore" here signals the Anglo-colonial habit of curry powder softened with apple, a combination that ran through British and American kitchens from the mid-nineteenth century onward and had little to do with anything cooked in Singapore itself. The dish's real subject is thrift. Mutton was the everyday roast of the period, a Sunday joint reappeared as Monday cold cuts and Tuesday hash, and cookbooks of the era give space to re-dressing cooked meat of all kinds — curry powder, chopped pepper and a rasp of ham being the standard tools. The instruction to use meat from "the day before yesterday" suggests a kitchen in which a cooked joint was expected to be worked through within a few days.