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Little Mutton Turnovers
(Turkey.) Chop 1 pound of cold mutton, add salt, pepper, cinnamon, and 1 chopped onion to a pound of meat. Cook with 1 ounce of butter, and make some good puff paste, roll it thin, cut into squares, and fill with spoonfuls of the meat. Pinch the edges, brush with melted butter, and bake in a hot oven. Serve in a mound, with a sauce or border of parsley.
A leftover-roast recipe of the kind every household cook once needed, and the Turkish detail is the cinnamon. Quantities for the spice are left to you.
- Hot ovenRead "a hot oven" as 425-450F. Puff paste needs that initial blast to lift; below about 400F the butter melts out before the layers set and the pastry turns greasy rather than flaky.
- Cold muttonThis assumes the remains of a roast leg or shoulder. Mutton is scarce outside halal and specialist butchers; cooked lamb shoulder is the closest substitute, and cooked beef works though it loses the character. Chop by hand rather than in a processor so the filling has texture.
- The filling is already cooked"Cook with 1 ounce of butter" means softening the onion in the butter and warming the meat through with the spices, a few minutes only. The mutton was roasted once already; simmering it again dries it out. Let the mixture cool before filling, or it will melt the pastry.
- CinnamonNo amount is given. Half a teaspoon per pound is a reasonable start; Turkish savoury pastries carry cinnamon as a warm background note, not a dessert flavour. Add it to the pan with the onion so it blooms in the butter.
- Puff pasteAn all-butter frozen puff pastry is an honest stand-in for the laminated dough the original assumes. Roll to about 1/8 inch and cut 3- to 4-inch squares; fold corner to corner into triangles.
- SealingPinching alone tends to spring open as the pastry rises. Brush the edges with water or beaten egg before pressing, then crimp with a fork. Keep filling off the border.
- Butter or egg washThe melted butter of the original gives colour but little shine. Egg wash browns more evenly if you want the look; butter is closer to what the book intends.
- Yield and servingA pound of meat rolled thin will fill somewhere around ten to twelve turnovers, depending on the size of your pastry sheet and squares; that is enough for four as a main course with a salad. Bake roughly 18-22 minutes until deep gold, and serve hot, in a mound with a sauce or a border of parsley as directed.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a small genre of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks that collected dishes country by country, and the bracketed "(Turkey.)" is the book's way of placing this one. What it describes is recognisably a cousin of the Turkish and wider Ottoman family of filled pastries — börek in its many forms — though the puff paste and the mound-and-parsley presentation are pure Anglo-American cookery of the 1900s, the compiler translating a foreign dish into the idiom her readers already knew. The cinnamon is the genuine survivor: warm spice in minced lamb is standard across Turkish and Levantine kitchens and would have struck an English or American cook of the period as distinctly exotic. Behind all of it lies the plain economy of a mutton-eating age, when a large joint was roasted once and appeared for days afterward in hashes, croquettes and turnovers like these.