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Navarin Parmentier
Procure a nice neck of tender mutton. Cut it into two-inch-square pieces. Heat two tablespoons good oil in a stewpan, add one clove sound garlic and heat on the range until a light brown, then remove the garlic from the pan and add the mutton. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper and gently brown for ten minutes, turning the pieces occasionally. Add two tablespoons flour, stir well with the wooden spoon. Moisten with one quart hot water, mix well. Cover the pan and let it come to a boil. Tie up as a bouquet two leeks, two branches parsley, three branches chives and two branches chervil (cerfeuil) and add it to the stew. Add also six sound, finely hashed shallots. Shift the pan a little aside from the briskness of the fire and let gently simmer for forty-five minutes, skimming the fat off the surface two or three times during that time. Then add two good-sized, peeled, raw potatoes, cut into one-inch-square pieces, and half pint tomato sauce. Cover the pan and let slowly cook for thirty minutes more. Remove the bouquet of herbs. Pour the stew into a hot deep dish. Sprinkle half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley over and serve.
A straightforward French mutton ragoût, and it works on a modern stove with almost no adjustment. The points below cover the vocabulary, the meat, and the two places where timing matters.
- Neck of muttonMutton is sheep over a year old, rarely sold in the US; lamb neck or shoulder is the usual substitute and will cook faster and taste milder. Neck is bony and collagen-rich, which is the point — it gives the sauce body. Two-inch squares from a boneless shoulder work equally well.
- Stewpan and heat controlA stewpan is a wide, straight-sided pan with a lid; a Dutch oven is the modern equivalent. "Shift the pan a little aside from the briskness of the fire" means drop to a bare simmer — on gas or induction, the lowest setting that keeps a few bubbles moving.
- The hinge: brown, then flour, then liquidThe recipe has you stir the flour into the fat and meat before the water goes in; giving it a moment in the fat first keeps the sauce from tasting raw. The text says simply to moisten with the quart of hot water and mix well, but adding it in stages and mixing smooth before it comes to a boil is easier.
- Chervil and the bouquetChervil (cerfeuil) is faintly aniseed and can be hard to find fresh; leave it out rather than substituting dried. Tie the leeks, parsley, chives and chervil with kitchen twine so the bundle lifts out whole at the end.
- Half pint tomato sauceThat is one cup, and it means a cooked tomato sauce, not ketchup and not raw purée. Canned crushed tomatoes simmered down with a little salt is close enough.
- Potato timingThirty minutes is right for one-inch cubes of a firm waxy potato. Russets at that size will collapse into the sauce — pleasant, but no longer Parmentier.
- SkimmingLamb and mutton throw a lot of fat. Skim two or three times as directed, or chill the stew and lift the set fat off the top the next day.
- YieldThe recipe gives no weight of meat, so yield is a guess; a quart of liquid and two potatoes suggests roughly four servings. Serve in a deep hot dish as written, with bread; no further starch is needed.
Navarin is the standard French name for a stew of mutton or lamb with a brown roux-thickened sauce, and the name is generally traced to the naval battle of Navarino in 1827, though the connection is traditional rather than documented — earlier and more prosaic explanations point to navet, the turnip that once went into it. Parmentier in any French menu title signals potatoes, after Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the eighteenth-century agronomist who campaigned to persuade the French that the potato was fit for people rather than only for livestock. Here the two labels together tell an experienced cook the whole dish before reading a word of it: lamb stew, brown sauce, potatoes in the pot. That shorthand is exactly why a book called The International Cook Book printed the French name untranslated. The garlic clove browned in oil and then discarded flavors the fat without leaving garlic in the finished sauce.