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A Shoulder of Mutton to Roast
Remove the bone, and fill the space with a force-meat made of bread crumbs, salt pork, chopped fine, pepper, salt, sweet marjoram and thyme; baste and dredge well. Serve with lemon or pickle.
A terse late-Victorian instruction that assumes a butcher, an open-fire or oven roast, and a cook who knows what "baste and dredge" means. The stuffing quantities are left entirely to judgement.
- The cutA whole lamb or mutton shoulder runs 4-6 lb bone-in. Ask the butcher to tunnel-bone it and leave it flat rather than rolled, so the pocket can be filled and then tied at intervals with butcher's twine.
- Mutton vs. lambMutton is sheep over two years old — stronger, coarser-grained, and rare outside halal and specialist butchers in most of the English-speaking world. A lamb shoulder behaves the same way in the oven but has a milder flavour and needs slightly less time.
- "Dredge"To dredge a roast meant dusting it with flour during cooking, to build a browned crust and thicken the pan drippings. A tablespoon or two shaken over the surface is plenty.
- Force-meat proportionsNone are given. A workable ratio is 2 cups fresh breadcrumbs to 4 oz finely chopped salt pork, with a teaspoon each of chopped marjoram and thyme; bind with an egg or a little stock if it will not hold together.
- Salt porkRinse it before chopping and go easy on the added salt — cured salt pork carries a great deal of its own. Unsmoked pork belly or fatty pancetta stands in well.
- Oven and temperatureStart at 425F for 20 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 325F. Shoulder is a hard-working muscle: it is best either roasted to about 145F internal and rested, or taken well past that to 190F for pull-apart tenderness. The temperature in between gives the toughest result.
- BastingBaste every 20 minutes with the pan fat. Stuffed shoulder dries at the ends before the centre is done, so a loose foil tent over the exposed edges after the first hour helps.
- Stuffing safetyThe force-meat contains raw pork. Check that the centre of the stuffing reaches 165F, not just the meat around it.
- ServingA boned 4-5 lb shoulder with stuffing serves six to eight. The "lemon or pickle" is doing the work of a sharp accompaniment against fatty meat — lemon wedges, pickled walnuts, or a sharp chutney all fit the intent.
Shoulder was the cheaper end of the sheep, and boning and stuffing it was one common way of turning an awkward, fatty, oddly shaped joint into something that could be carved at table like a proper roast. Force-meat — from the French farce, stuffing — was a staple of English cookery for centuries, and the combination here of breadcrumbs, salt pork, marjoram and thyme is close to what Hannah Glasse and her successors had been printing since the 1700s. The instruction to serve with lemon or pickle reflects a long-standing English habit of cutting the richness of mutton with acid, the same logic behind caper sauce with boiled mutton and mint sauce with lamb. By the time this book appeared, mutton was still ordinary household meat in Britain and much of North America; its near-total disappearance from Western butchers' counters came later, generally traced to the mid-twentieth century and the rise of a market for young, mild lamb.