“In the back room Brett and Bill were sitting on barrels surrounded by the dancers. Everybody had his arms on everybody else’s shoulders, and they were all singing. Mike was sitting at a table with several men in their shirt-sleeves, eating from a bowl of tuna fish, chopped onions and vinegar. They were all drinking wine and mopping up the oil and vinegar with pieces of bread.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
Put the shoulder of mutton to boil in your two-gallon pot, with a handful of salt and plenty of water, allow it to boil gently for about two hours, and when done, and placed on its dish, smother it over with the following sauce:--Chop six or eight large onions, and boil them with a pint of water for twenty minutes, by which time the water must be reduced to half a pint; then add two ounces of butter, a pint of milk, four ounces of flour, pepper, and salt, and stir the sauce whilst boiling for ten minutes. A shoulder of mutton for boiling is all the better for its being salted for two or three days previous to its being cooked.
Sources: The passage is from Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Francatelli, A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes of 1852, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — forest cloth, grapes stamp.