Season a leg of mutton well with salt and pepper. Dredge with flour and let bake in a hot oven until nearly done. Then add some boiled turnips cut in quarters; sprinkle with pepper and flour; let bake until browned. Serve the mutton on a platter with the turnips.
March 15 — No. 15
Scotch
A terse roasting note rather than a full recipe: the original assumes you know how long a leg of mutton takes and what "nearly done" looks like. The key points are the temperature and the fact that the turnips are only in the pan for the last stretch.
- "A hot oven"In books of this period the term generally covers something like 400-450F. For a whole leg it is easier to start high for 20-30 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 325-350F for the remainder; a full hour at the top of that range will scorch the flour dredge before the interior is anywhere near cooked.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is sheep over about two years old: stronger flavoured and slower to tenderise. It is sold by some halal and specialty butchers; a leg of lamb substitutes directly and will cook faster.
- Doneness, since none is givenA bone-in leg of 5-7 lb runs about 15-20 minutes per pound at 325-350F after the initial blast. Go by an instant-read thermometer in the thickest part away from the bone: 130-135F for pink, 145F and up for the well-done result this era expected.
- When to add the turnips"Nearly done" means about 30-40 minutes of roasting left. The turnips are pre-boiled, so they need only long enough to take on fat and colour; added at the start they collapse into mush.
- Boil the turnips first, and drain them dryQuarter and boil until just tender, then drain thoroughly and let the surface steam off before they go in the pan. Wet turnips will not brown, and the flour sprinkled over them will go pasty.
- The flour dredgeFlour on the fat surface browns into a thin savoury crust and thickens whatever drippings you spoon over at the end. Use a fine dusting through a sieve; a heavy coat blackens in a hot oven.
- RestingLet the leg stand 15-20 minutes under loose foil before carving. The recipe gives no rest, but a large leg carved straight from the oven loses its juices onto the platter.
- YieldA leg of this size serves 6-8, with 2-3 lb of turnips.
Mutton and turnips is the plainest possible statement of Scottish farm cooking, and its appearance in a book gathering dishes from many places says as much about how outsiders saw Scotland as about Scottish cooking itself: sheep on the hill, root vegetables in the ground, and little else. The turnip in question is properly the swede or yellow neep, generally said to have spread through Scotland as winter fodder that also fed the household, and it is the same vegetable that goes into the mashed neeps served with haggis. Roasting the joint dry with a flour dredge, rather than stewing or boiling it, is often described as the treatment reserved for a good leg; tougher cuts of mutton went into broth. The recipe's brevity is typical of the calendar cookbooks, which gave one dish per day and assumed the reader already knew how to roast meat.