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Breast of Mutton and Green Peas
Select a breast of mutton, and cut it into small pieces, dredge it with flonr, and fry a nice brown in butter. Cover it with water and add pepper and salt; put the pan over a moderate fire to stew, until the meat is very done and tender. Take out the meat, take off all the fat from the gravy, and just before serving add a quart of tender young peas which have been boiled with the strained gravy, and let the whole boil gently until the peas are done. Very nice.
A plain braise that depends on two things: rendering the fat out of a very fatty cut, and keeping the peas out of the pot until the end. The original text has a printer's error — "dredge it with flonr" is flour.
- The cutBreast of mutton is the belly-side rib section, fatty and heavily seamed with connective tissue. Butchers now sell it as lamb breast, often rolled and tied; ask for it bone-in and cut across the ribs into 2-inch pieces. Bone-in lamb shoulder or neck works the same way if breast is unavailable.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is sheep over two years old — stronger in flavour and slower to soften than anything sold as lamb today. Lamb breast will be tender in about half the time, so judge by feel rather than the clock.
- "A moderate fire"On a modern burner this means the lowest setting that keeps a lazy simmer, with the surface barely moving. Lamb breast needs roughly 1 1/2 hours; true mutton can want 2 1/2 to 3. It is done when a fork twists the meat off the rib without resistance.
- Skimming is the whole pointBreast releases a great deal of fat, and the recipe's instruction to lift the meat out and take all the fat from the gravy is not optional politeness. Easiest route: chill the strained liquid until the fat sets in a cap and lift it off, then reheat. Left in, the dish tastes greasy and the peas turn slick.
- A quart of peasProbably peas already shelled, which is four cups; at roughly a cup of shelled peas per pound of pods, that is a large quantity, so scale down if you like. Frozen peas are a fair substitute and are often closer to "tender young" than fresh peas at market.
- Cooking the peasThe instruction is slightly tangled: boil the peas in the strained, degreased gravy, then return the meat and let it all come gently together. Shelled fresh young peas take 4 to 6 minutes, frozen 3. Anything longer and they go grey and mealy.
- ThickeningThe flour from the dredge gives a very light body at best. If you want the gravy to coat, reduce it by a third while the meat rests rather than adding more flour at the end.
- YieldA breast of about 2 1/2 to 3 lb, bone-in, serves four. Bread or boiled potatoes are the traditional companion; the peas are the vegetable.
Breast was the cheapest part of the sheep through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, which is why household cookbooks return to it so often — the money cuts were the leg and the loin. Stewing it in its own liquid and then finishing with peas is the standard English treatment, close kin to the older haricot of mutton and to Irish stew, and the pairing of lamb with the first peas of the season is old enough in English cooking to be a fixture rather than an invention. The recipe also tells you something about the period's supply: peas by the quart, shelled at home, and mutton rather than lamb, since sheep were kept for wool and slaughtered late. The flat closing verdict, "Very nice," is probably characteristic of turn-of-the-century compilations, where recipes were gathered from contributors and printed with their own endorsements attached.