Season the breast of mutton with salt, pepper, thyme and mace; let stew slowly with 1 onion and 2 cloves of garlic chopped. Add some chopped capers and mushrooms; cook until tender. Then thicken the sauce with flour mixed with a glass of wine and boil up. Serve hot with baked turnips.
March 21 — No. 21
Swedish
A terse nineteenth-century braise: the method is sound, but the original assumes you know how much liquid to add and how long "slowly" means.
- The cutBreast of mutton is a fatty, bony cut that rewards long moist cooking. Lamb breast is the usual substitute now; figure on about 3 lb bone-in, which serves three or four. Trim the heaviest surface fat but leave enough to keep the meat moist.
- Liquid, which the recipe never mentions"let stew slowly" presumes a covered pot with liquid in it, though the original says nothing about how much. Brown the seasoned meat first if you like, then add water or stock to come roughly halfway up and cover tightly.
- TimingBreast needs 2 to 2 1/2 hours at a bare simmer, or the same in a 325F oven, before it is genuinely tender. Cut it into pieces along the ribs first if the pot is small.
- MaceThe dried outer coat of nutmeg, warmer and less sweet. About 1/4 teaspoon ground is right for this quantity; more turns the sauce medicinal.
- Capers and mushrooms lateAdd them in the last 20 minutes. Capers boiled for two hours lose their bite entirely and the mushrooms collapse into the sauce.
- "A glass of wine"A loose measure; period wineglass measures are usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so anything from 2 to 4 fl oz of dry white is defensible. Stir 2 tablespoons flour into it smooth, then whisk that into the simmering sauce and boil a full minute so the flour cooks out.
- Degrease before thickeningMutton and lamb breast give up a lot of fat. Skim, or chill the pot and lift the cap, before you add the flour and wine; otherwise the sauce will not come together.
- Baked turnipsPeel, cut into wedges, toss with butter and salt and roast at 400F for 35 to 40 minutes. They are there to cut the richness, so keep them plain.
The book resembles a genre of turn-of-the-century "dishes of all nations" collections, which paired a date with a national label and rarely worried whether the dish was truly national. Mutton itself was the ordinary meat of the period: older sheep were kept for wool and eaten at the end of their working lives, so cookbooks assumed a strong-flavoured, sinewy meat that needed hours in a covered pot and assertive seasoning. Lamb largely displaced it in English-speaking markets over the twentieth century, which is why the cut now sounds obscure.