Season a leg of mutton with salt, pepper and a pinch of cloves. Lay in a baking-pan with 1 sliced onion, 2 celery roots, 3 cloves of garlic and 2 carrots cut fine, 1 bay-leaf, a sprig of thyme and a few peppercorns. Pour over 1 cup of vinegar and 1 cup of hot water. Dredge with flour and let bake in a hot oven. Baste often with the sauce in the pan until nearly done; then add 1 pint of sour cream and let bake until done. Thicken with flour; boil up and pour over the roast.
A sour-cream-and-vinegar roast in the Polish na dziko manner, written for cooks who knew mutton and could judge a fire by hand. Two things need attention: the meat itself, and the cream at the end.
- MuttonMutton is sheep over two years old, strongly flavoured and firm; it is hard to find in American shops, though British butchers and specialist suppliers still carry it. A bone-in leg of lamb of 5-6 lb behaves similarly here, but cooks faster and tastes milder, so hold back a little of the vinegar.
- "A hot oven"In this period the phrase is usually glossed as roughly 400-450F. For a whole leg, that heat is best used for the first 20-30 minutes to set the flour crust, then dropped to about 325F for the long braise-roast in the pan liquid.
- Celery rootsCeleriac, not stalk celery. Two roots is around 1 to 1 1/2 lb peeled and diced, which is a substantial share of the vegetable base and a large part of the finished sauce's body.
- The vinegarA full cup of vinegar against a cup of water is sharp by modern standards; the acid would have helped soften strong old meat. With lamb, half vinegar and half stock gives a sauce that is still recognisably sour without stripping the meat.
- The sour cream is the hingeCommercial sour cream today is thinner than the period article and often stabilised with gum, and it can break when it hits a hot acidic pan. Use full-fat sour cream or creme fraiche, temper it with a ladle of hot pan juices before it goes in, and keep the finished sauce below a hard boil.
- "Thicken with flour; boil up"Probably a flour-and-water slurry stirred into the pan sauce, though a dredge or kneaded flour and butter would also fit the wording. Since the cream is already in by that point, a beurre manie worked in off the heat is safer; if the recipe's own order is followed, the brief boil is the likeliest thing to curdle the sauce.
- DonenessNo time is given because none could be. Lamb leg reaches medium at about 145F at the thickest point, is well done and sliceable around 175-180F, and only becomes genuinely pull-apart nearer 195F; the vinegar braise suits the higher end. Reckon 2 to 2 1/2 hours for a 5-6 lb leg, longer for true mutton.
- YieldA leg of this size serves 6 to 8, with the vegetables strained or pressed into the sauce. Boiled potatoes, buckwheat groats or braised cabbage are common accompaniments.
Polish cookery has a long-standing family of dishes prepared na dziko "wild-style": domestic meat given a sharp treatment of vinegar, root vegetables, bay, thyme and peppercorns, then finished with sour cream, so that it approaches the flavour of venison or hare. The technique is often associated with the game-heavy tables of the szlachta, where a leg of mutton dressed this way could stand in for the day's hunt. The finishing pint of sour cream sets it apart from most versions of the German sauerbraten it otherwise resembles, though some sauerbraten recipes also finish with soured cream; soured cream, rather than butter or wine, is a characteristic enriching agent across Polish, Lithuanian and Ukrainian roasts and braises. It appears here in a 1900s American day-a-nation collection, a genre that picks one emblematic dish per country.