Dining at Downton: Irish stew

I am known to get emotionally involved with fictional characters. When they fall in love, I swoon around the house. When they suffer heartbreak, I moan along with them. When they struggle to figure out what they really think about an important issue, my mind gets muddled and filled with conflicted emotions. When they die, I am crushed.

Devastated.

Yes, I am talking about Downton Abbey. No major spoilers here, but after episode 4, I lay on the couch for about half an hour babbling about how my heart had been ripped out and stomped on. How unfair this latest twist was! How could the writers take away one of my favorite characters! Death in the WWI trenches, I could understand. The Spanish flu, I could see coming. But this? My friends, it's been over two weeks and I'm still recovering.

As viewers, we're entitled to some serious comfort food to help us deal with this latest tragedy. And it's also time to give Branson his due.

Branson--or "Tom," as the more enlightened family members have to remind others to call him--burst into Downton as the revolutionary Irish chauffeur. Now that he's married Lady Sybil with the dubious blessing of Lord Grantham, he's slowly becoming a full-fledged member of the Crawley family. And this most recent twist of fate has him growing up fast. He's finding the right time to be a rebel and the right time to smooth things over with the family, and it's hugely gratifying. As one of my colleagues said, when hinting at things to come in Downton Abbey, Branson really stands up in this season. In just a few episodes, he's become one of my favorite characters.

So, in honor of Branson, and to soothe our aching hearts, I've put together a comforting Irish stew that our former chauffeur would be glad to find at the dinner table. It's an incredibly simple, easy recipe, one that calls for a few hours of simmering on the stove. With just six ingredients, I wasn't expecting much, but the slow cooking lets all the flavors melt together. The result is a tender, rich lamb stew that falls apart at the touch of a spoon.

Also, in case you're like me and need newspaper articles to remind you that none of this is, in fact, real, here's a fun interview with the actress who plays Mrs. Patmore. She talks about who actually does the cooking on set, and how much of the kitchen is functional, and who corrects the kitchen hierarchy when it goes awry. Who knew Mrs. Patmore was the Gordon Ramsey of her day?

Irish Stew

(adapted from Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management)

1 1/2 lbs lamb shoulder on the bone (the original calls for mutton, but lamb will do just fine)

3 cups water, with more at the ready

2  lbs russet potatoes, peeled

2 yellow onions

salt and pepper to taste

Place the lamb shoulder in a medium Dutch oven, sprinkle with salt, and pour in the water. If needed, add more water to just cover the lamb. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce to low heat, and let simmer, covered, for 1 hour. Meanwhile, slice the potatoes and onions thinly.

Remove the lamb from the Dutch oven and cut the meat off the bone into small, 1-inch chunks. Skim the fat off the broth in the pot. Place a layer of potatoes in the bottom of the pan, and cover with a layer of onions. Scatter the meat on top and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cover with another layer of potatoes and onions and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bring the stew to a boil over medium-high heat, then reduce to low heat, cover, and let simmer for 1 hour. Stir occasionally to prevent bottom layer from burning.

Serve with fresh bread and cheese, plus plenty of beer to soothe your aching heart.

Brunswick Stew

We are pulling Christmas together here in Ohio. Everyone's pitched in wherever they can, and the house is finally starting to look holiday-ish. We're winding garlands around the banisters and laying boxwood across the mantle.

We keep asking each other, "What are we forgetting?" "Are we in good shape this year?" Because usually Christmas Eve feels rather frantic.

And aside from some last-minute wrapping, we are in good shape. There was time enough for baking cookies this morning, and throwing together a quick cranberry-banana bread yesterday afternoon. I even managed to make Brunswick stew, our Christmas Eve staple. Never mind the fact that we're having Christmas Eve dinner at my aunt and uncle's house; it's tradition, so we have to make it. You know how it is.*

I'm not sure where this tradition of serving Brunswick stew came from, since it supposedly originated in the South. And our family is solidly New England/mid-Western. Opposing sources claim that the stew originated in Germany, which might make a little more sense, given my mother's German ancestors. Whatever the source, it's been a family staple since my mother was little.

It's a rustic sort of dish, full of meat that's falling apart and potatoes that melt in your mouth. If you're being really true to the colonial Williamsburg recipe, you'd make it with "two Squirrels," but I decided to grant them a reprieve and use up the last of the Thanksgiving turkey.**

You simmer the turkey, a half pound of ham, and a sliced onion in about three quarts of water for a time, until the water has turned to a  fragrant broth. Since I used pre-cooked turkey and ham, I didn't have to wait the couple hours that it would take for the meat to cook through.

Then you add lima beans, corn, four diced "Irish Potatoes" (I used Idaho, since I'm not quite sure what Irish potatoes are), and tomatoes. I'll be honest: I really cheated here. We had frozen lima beans and corn, as well as canned tomatoes, so the only fresh item I stirred in was the potatoes. But sometimes, during the holiday season, you have to cheat a little so it all gets done.

I tossed in a few dried herbs that might have been floating around a colonial kitchen--rosemary, tarragon, parsley--then simmered the stew for about an hour. It was finished just in time for a quick meal with crusty cracked-wheat bread, another family staple that we make whenever we have the chance.

The stew was just the thing for a chilly winter's night. Warm, hearty, filling; it tasted like Christmas. Funny how you associate holidays with special foods.

If you're celebrating Christmas tonight and tomorrow, I wish you the best of the season, full of your favorite traditional foods (and maybe some new ones, too). And if you're not partaking in the holiday, I hope you have a few good meals set aside for this chilly weekend. Try the Brunswick stew! Just spare the squirrels, okay?


* The stew served as our Christmas Eve-Eve meal last night, which was just as good.
** Which was frozen, don't worry. And it was a Williamsburg turkey, so we were being extra historically accurate!

Stewed Jack Rabbit and Dumplings

Up to this point, I've been playing it safe. The recipes I've chosen have at least mildly resembled something I've eaten in the past. But that all changes today.

That's right. I cooked a bunny.

I understand that this post may lose me some readers.* That's okay. The nineteenth-century prairie wasn't all dry cornbread and apple turnovers. Pa Ingalls went out hunting, and he brought back turkeys and blackbirds and deer and rabbits. It's about time I investigated some of the squishier aspects of prairie meals.

Now, The Joy of Cooking informed me that while rabbit stew may seen like a foreign concept, many people still enjoy rabbit today. This unfortunately led me to believe that I could procure a dressed rabbit at my local Whole Foods. Not so, friends. I had to call around to a few specialty butchers before I found Central Meat Market, which offers beef, poultry, rabbit, goose, quail, whole pigs, and even partial cows (with a special order). Having never ventured into a specialty butcher shop before, I was a little nervous. But the butcher was quite friendly, and he even chopped up the rabbit for me.

Then I proceeded to psych myself up for this recipe. Josh and I went to the Coggeshall Farm Harvest Festival a few hours before I started to cook, which proved inspiring and...um...guilt-inducing.

We visited a hearth cooking site (manned by a well-dressed young fop), where a whole turkey was stewing over the fire. We heard all about heritage breed chickens. We strolled past a pony ride and tried our hand at checkers. Then we stopped by a crafts tent and petted the angora rabbits on display. They were so, so soft and sweet.

That's when the guilt set in. It's hard to think about cooking an animal for dinner when you're petting its relative at a festival.

Nevertheless, I had to soldier on. So that evening I tried to forget the cute bunnies and focus on the meal at hand.

I started off with salt pork (as if I'd use anything else). I browned some diced-up pieces of pork in a Dutch oven, then removed the pork for later. The rabbit pieces went into the fat to brown (while I tried to look at the pieces as abstract bits of meat. Rabbit ends up looking disconcertingly like chicken, which I wasn't expecting). Meanwhile, I simmered the giblets (heart, liver, etc.) in a separate saucepan with water, and added the liquid to the Dutch oven to simmer with the rabbit.

At this point I wasn't at all sure I wanted to eat this stew for dinner.

But still, on I went. I toasted some flour to a nice cocoa-brown, then mixed it with the chopped-up giblets and some water to form a dark gravy. Then I prepared some dumpling dough (your basic flour-salt-buttermilk-baking soda mixture) and got ready for the final stretch. When the meat was tender, I mixed the gravy and the salt pork pieces back into the Dutch oven, and dropped the dumpling dough on top. After about 10 minutes, the dumplings had puffed into a nice crust, and the stew was ready.

Was I ready?

I tried the sauce and dumplings before I tested the rabbit. The sauce was incredibly rich and earthy--definitely the giblets' doing. It was a little too much for me. The rabbit, on the other hand, was lightly gamey and a delicious combination of chicken and venison. So tasty.

I definitely wouldn't make this stew again (that sauce), and I'd have to work up the courage to buy another skinned rabbit from the butcher before I ventured near it again. But preparing for this stew was a surprisingly sobering experience. It wasn't until I visited that butcher that I realized just how sanitized our mainstream American experience of food has become. I've been accustomed to seeing only beef, chicken, turkey, and pork in the supermarket, wrapped up nicely in plastic packages. Were it not for this project, I doubt I would have fully considered how limited that meat selection really is.



* But not you, Lyuda. You've eaten rabbits before, right?