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Mutton Broth
To six pounds of neck of mutton take three quarts of water, carrots, turnips and potatoes. Soak the mutton in cold water for an hour; cut off the scrags and all the fat, and put into the stew-pan with three quarts of water. It must be simmered three hours, skimming thoroughly. The carrots, turnips and onions, cut into suitable pieces, are added after the first skimming, and also four tablespoonfuls of pearl barley. Half an hour before taking from the fire add a little chopped parsley and serve hot. Serve the meat separately, divided into cutlets of two bones each.
A straightforward long-simmered broth, but the ingredient list and the method disagree with each other in a couple of places, and the barley timing needs adjusting.
- The list and the method don't matchPotatoes are named at the top but never added; onions are added in the method but never listed. Treat both as optional: onion belongs in the pot early, potatoes are better added in the last 30 minutes or they disintegrate.
- Mutton and the scragMutton is older sheep (definitions vary; usually over a year, sometimes reckoned two or more), deeper in flavour and much tougher than lamb. Butchers rarely stock it; a 6 lb lamb neck works, though it will be milder and will likely be tender well before three hours. The scrag is the thin bony top end of the neck — the recipe says to cut it off, but it makes excellent broth, so keep it in the pot and simply don't serve it.
- Barley goes in laterFour tablespoons of pearl barley simmered for close to three hours will collapse into paste and cloud the broth. Add it for the last 45 to 60 minutes if you want distinct grains.
- Vegetables tooCarrots and turnips added after the first skimming will be spent long before the meat is done. Add them in the final 45 minutes for texture, or accept that their job here is to flavour the liquid rather than to be eaten.
- Simmer means simmerA bare tremble, not a boil. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat into the liquid and turns the broth grey and greasy — which is exactly the fault the thorough skimming is meant to prevent.
- The cold soakThe hour in cold water draws out blood and makes skimming easier. It is not essential if you skim diligently in the first twenty minutes, when most of the scum rises.
- Better degreasingNeck is fatty. Chill the strained broth overnight and lift the solid cap of fat off the top; this removes far more than skimming alone.
- Yield and servingThree quarts of water will reduce over three hours, perhaps to something like two and a half quarts of broth, which should serve six or so as a first course. The meat served separately as two-bone cutlets makes a second course, and will want salt, mustard or a caper sauce, having given much of its flavour to the pot.
Mutton broth with barley is a long-established form of British and Irish household cookery, the same basic pot that produces Scotch broth: cheap bony neck, root vegetables, a handful of grain, and hours of low heat. Its persistence in late nineteenth-century American books like this one owes as much to the sickroom as to the dinner table e standa standard invalid food, and it was often recommended for convalescents in the Victorian period, which is why so many cookbooks of the era carry a version of it whether or not the household ate mutton by choice. The instruction to serve the meat separately as two-bone cutlets reads as a thrift measure dressed as a course: one pot, one fire, two dishes. Mutton itself has largely vanished from American butchery, displaced through the twentieth century by younger, milder lamb, so a recipe that once assumed a strong-flavoured animal now has to be made with a gentler one.