Home › Meats › Boned Leg of Mutton
Boned Leg of Mutton
Remove the bone; wipe inside and out with a wet cloth; sprinkle the inside with salt; stuff and sew. Put on a rack in dripping pan with some of the kidney suet on the meat and in the pan.
Dredge with salt, pepper and flour, and bake in a hot oven. Baste as soon as the flour is brown, and repeat this often. Bake one hour, if liked rare; one hour and a quarter, if well done.
A boned and stuffed roast written for a cook who already knew what to put inside it. The instructions assume a hot coal-range oven and a joint of real mutton, both of which need translating.
- Mutton, if you can get itMutton is sheep over two years old — darker, firmer, and far stronger in flavour than lamb. Almost no supermarket carries it; a 5-6 lb leg of lamb is the usual substitute, and it will taste milder and cook a little faster.
- "A hot oven"That is usually rendered as somewhere around 400-450F; the book gives no figure, since the range was judged by hand or by a flour test. For a stuffed joint it is worth starting high for 15-20 minutes to set the flour crust, then dropping to 350F for the remainder, or the outside will be dry before the centre is done.
- The stuffing is the hingeThe recipe assumes you know the house forcemeat — typically breadcrumbs, suet or butter, onion, and sage or savoury herbs, bound with egg. Pack it loosely. A tightly stuffed cavity insulates the centre and throws the timings out completely.
- Timing and temperatureOne hour for a boned leg is only realistic for a smaller joint. Go by a thermometer: 130-135F in the thickest meat for rare, 145F for medium. The stuffing itself should reach 165F, which for a stuffed roast usually means the meat runs closer to medium than rare.
- Kidney suetThe hard fat from around the kidneys, sold as suet at a butcher's counter. It bastes the joint as it renders. Beef suet works; so does simply rubbing the meat with a little softened butter or oil if suet is unavailable.
- DredgingDusting with flour before roasting gives the browned crust the recipe tells you to wait for. Do not baste until that flour has coloured, or you wash it off into the pan.
- Sewing and boningA butcher will bone and tie a leg on request, which is faster than doing it yourself. If you sew it, use undyed cotton butcher's twine and a trussing needle, and count the stitches so none stay in the meat.
- Resting and yieldRest the joint 15-20 minutes under loose foil before carving; a stuffed roast slices badly hot. A 5-6 lb boned leg with stuffing serves eight to ten.
Boning a leg and filling the cavity with forcemeat was standard practice in nineteenth-century English and American kitchens, and it survived into books like this one because it solved two problems at once: a boned joint carves into neat slices with no bone to work around, and the stuffing stretches an expensive cut across more plates. Mutton, rather than lamb, was the ordinary sheep meat of the period, from sheep eaten at the end of their working lives, so the strong, almost gamey flavour that modern cooks associate with mutton was simply what sheep tasted like. The shift to slaughtering young is largely a twentieth-century development, which is why this recipe's leading ingredient is now the hardest part to source. The brisk instruction to "stuff" without saying with what is typical of household manuals of the era, which expected the reader to have a standard bread-and-herb forcemeat in her repertoire.