So many cooks contributed to this recipe, that it is a quilt of memories - but this case, too many cooks didn't spoil the broth.

The basis of this stew is frying the meat and stirring in flour to coat it and thicken the stew. This was my Irish grandmother's fabled secret. Her stews always had a luscious, rich taste, the meat impossibly tender and full of flavor. She never measured the flour, she just dipped her hand into the flour sack and tossed some in to the meat as it was frying, and added a sprinkle of pepper and salt. The resulting roux rivaled the best a trained chef could do.

She used lard to fry the meat. I use olive oil, having developed a taste for it in Spain many years ago. There, a wonderful cook showed me the value of olive oil as a cooking medium, and taught me the correct combinations of herbs for dishes. ``Only parsley, sage and thyme should go into a stew,'' Manuela said. ``These three enhance the many flavors of a good stew.''

About three long sprigs of thyme are used. To add them to the pot, you just grip one end of the sprig and run your thumb and forefinger down, so the leaves fall away into the stew.

The parsley and sage are chopped finely together and added before the end of cooking so the delicate flavors are not stewed away.

Being of Irish birth, I can't imagine a stew being complete without dumplings. The dumplings for this stew came about through my own experimentation. My grandmother's dumplings were light as a feather, but after we moved to England, I grew to hate those heavy cannonballs made with thick white suet fat that were a staple of most English stews.

Because I had never bothered to find out how my grandmother made her dumplings (how remiss of me!) I started experimenting to recreate them. From perusing American recipes I learned about ``cobbler", where a kind of scone dough (or biscuit, as the American cooks call it) is laid over a savory dish and baked.

So I fiddled about with the recipe, to make a lighter dumpling more like my grandmother's. Later I experimented with the flavor, and parsley added the crowning touch.

The pumpkin trick I learned in Australia, from a cook so devoted to pumpkin that she will use it in anything, even cakes and scones. After enjoying a most delicious meal of lamb which had fragrant golden gravy around it, I asked my friend how she achieved such a rich color and texture.

``Simple," she said. ``Just cut up some pumpkin and bung it in to cook with the meat. Pumpkin

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