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A Leg of Mutton to Roast
Require your butcher to take off the shank and the skin; wrap the flank nicely around, and secure the skewers; cut a gash in the joint and turn up the bone close to the fillet; secure it with skewers; dredge well with flour and salt; put your meat to roast over a good fire and baste often. Serve with currant jelly.
This is spit-roasting instructions from an era when "roast" meant in front of an open fire, and it assumes a butcher will do the boning and trussing for you. Translating it means choosing an oven temperature and a target internal temperature, neither of which the original gives.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is sheep older than a year, and by the stricter definitions over two, with darker meat and a much stronger flavour; it is sold today mainly by halal and specialty butchers. A leg of lamb behaves the same way in the oven but cooks a little faster and tastes considerably milder.
- "Over a good fire" means an oven nowThe original roasts the joint at an open fire; the text says only "over a good fire" and does not describe the apparatus. In a modern oven, start at 450F for 20 minutes to set a crust, then drop to 325F for the remainder. These temperatures are a modern choice, not something the original gives.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockThis is the instruction that matters. Pull the leg at 130-135F at the thickest point for pink, 145F for medium; mutton is often preferred a little further along than lamb. Rest 15-20 minutes before carving, and expect roughly 15-20 minutes per pound as a rough guide only.
- The shank and the flankRemoving the shank makes the joint fit a spit or a roasting pan; the thin flank flap is folded under and pinned so it does not scorch. Butcher's twine does the job of the skewers, and metal skewers should come out before carving.
- Turning up the boneCutting a gash at the joint and levering the bone back makes the joint more compact and easier to secure; the recipe does not say why it is done. A butcher will simply remove the pelvic bone if asked.
- Dredging with flourThe flour-and-salt coating browns into a crust and thickens the drippings for gravy. Salt the meat an hour ahead if you can, then flour it just before it goes into the heat.
- BastingBasting every 20-25 minutes is plenty in an oven. Opening the door constantly costs more heat than the basting gains.
- YieldThe recipe gives no weight; a bone-in leg of average size serves 6-8. Currant jelly is the period accompaniment, as the recipe directs; mint sauce and a pan gravy from the floured drippings both suit mutton well.
Roast leg of mutton with currant jelly was one of the fixed points of the nineteenth-century Anglo-American dinner table, and its appearance in a turn-of-the-century American household book shows how long British habits held on in the meat chapter. Sheep were kept for wool as much as for meat, so the animals that reached the kitchen were often mature, and mutton's assertive flavour is exactly why a sharp-sweet jelly is served alongside it rather than a plain gravy. The instruction to "require your butcher" to take off the shank and the skin, with the skewering left to the cook, is characteristic of the period: shoppers dealt with a butcher face to face and expected butchery as part of the purchase. Within a generation or two American taste had shifted decisively toward young lamb, and mutton largely disappeared from grocery cases here while remaining common in the Middle East and South Asia.