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Mutton, Shabeloff
Cut the mutton left over from Saturday in half-inch pieces and place in a sautoire. Season with half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon paprika, pour in half gill sherry, lightly mix, cover pan and cook five minutes. Pour in a cream sauce. Mix well and cook fifteen minutes, then add tablespoon freshly grated horseradish; mix well two minutes. Pour in hot dish and serve.
A leftovers dish from a book that assumed a large joint of roast mutton sat in the larder from the weekend. The whole thing takes about twenty-five minutes and depends entirely on the quality of the cream sauce.
- The hinge: horseradish goes in lastFresh horseradish loses its heat within minutes of meeting hot liquid. The two-minute finish is deliberate; stir it in off the direct heat and serve at once rather than holding the pan.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow pan with a lid, what most kitchens now call a sauté pan or a wide saucepan. The wide base matters here because the meat should sit in a single layer while it takes up the sherry.
- Half a gill of sherryA gill is half a cup, so this is 1/4 cup, 2 fl oz. Use a dry amontillado or fino rather than anything labelled cooking sherry.
- How much cream sauceThe original assumes a stock sauce standing ready. For roughly a pound of cut mutton, 1 1/2 cups of béchamel is right: enough to coat generously without drowning the meat.
- MuttonTrue mutton, meaning sheep over a year old, is rare outside halal butchers and specialist suppliers. Leftover roast leg or shoulder of lamb behaves the same way, though it is milder and will want the full tablespoon of horseradish.
- The fifteen minutesThe meat is already cooked, so this is about the sauce taking on flavour, not tenderising anything. Keep it at a bare simmer; a hard boil will make already-roasted mutton stringy and break the sauce.
- Grating the horseradishA tablespoon of freshly grated root is sharper and cleaner than the same volume of jarred horseradish, which is cut with vinegar. If using prepared horseradish, drain it and expect to add more.
- YieldThe recipe never states how much mutton; on the assumption of about a pound it will stretch to three or four, over boiled potatoes, rice or toast. It is a supper dish, not a dinner centrepiece.
Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, built The International Cook Book (1911) around several thousand short entries, and a number of them begin the way this one does: with what is left from an earlier meal. The name is unexplained in the book and no origin for it can be documented; whatever its source, the dish is not kosher, since cream sauce on mutton mixes meat and milk. Filippini's international titles were often loose gestures at a cuisine rather than faithful transcriptions, and the pairing of sherry, béchamel and fresh horseradish is more Franco-American restaurant cooking than anything else.