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Boiled Leg of Mutton
Wipe meat; pound gently all over with a cleaver. Place in a kettle and cover with cold water, add one small carrot sliced, one turnip sliced, four slices onion, two sprays parsley, a bit of bay leaf and one-half teaspoon peppercorns. Cover and bring quickly to boiling point; boil five minutes. Skim. Reduce heat and simmer until meat is tender (from two to three hours). Add one tablespoon salt the last hour of cooking. Serve with
A plain boiled joint of the sort that anchored a Sunday table when mutton was the everyday meat. The text breaks off mid-sentence at "Serve with" — in a book of this vintage that almost certainly means caper sauce, the standard accompaniment.
- The hinge: never let it boilAfter the initial five-minute boil and skimming, the water should sit at 180–190°F, with the surface barely trembling. A rolling boil for two hours squeezes the muscle fibres and gives you dry, stringy meat in a good broth, which is the opposite of what is wanted.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is older sheep; the line is usually drawn at over two years, though definitions vary and the word is sometimes applied to any sheep over a year. It is strongly flavoured and firm, sold now mainly by halal butchers and specialist farms. A 5–7 lb leg of lamb substitutes directly but is tender far sooner — start checking at 90 minutes rather than two hours.
- "Kettle"In a book of this period this means a large lidded pot, not a tea kettle. You need something that holds the leg comfortably covered with water — a 12-quart stockpot or a large enamelled roaster with a lid.
- Pounding with a cleaverTapping the joint all over with the flat of a heavy blade was the traditional way to tenderize the surface of a tough joint. Optional with modern lamb; still worth doing with older mutton.
- Salt in the last hourThe late salting looks deliberate, and is often explained as keeping more of the meat's juice out of the broth, though the effect is debatable. One tablespoon in a potful of water is a light seasoning; taste and add more if you intend to use the liquid as stock.
- Judging doneness"Tender" here means a skewer slides in with no resistance, around 175–180°F at the thickest point — well past pink, because this is a braise-style cooking, not a roast.
- The sauceCaper sauce is the traditional finish: a white sauce made with a cup of the cooking liquor plus milk, thickened with butter and flour, with two tablespoons of drained capers and a little of their vinegar stirred in off the heat.
- Yield and the brothA 6 lb leg serves eight generously. Strain and chill the cooking liquid overnight, lift the fat, and you have several quarts of excellent mutton or lamb broth for barley soup.
Boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce was one of the fixed points of the nineteenth-century English and American dinner table, praised precisely because it required no skill beyond patience and gave you soup as a by-product. Mutton was then the ordinary meat of sheep — lambs were worth more alive, as wool and breeding stock, so animals came to table older and with a pronounced flavour that boiling with root vegetables and peppercorns was meant to temper. The taste for it collapsed in the twentieth century, generally traced to refrigerated New Zealand imports pushing young lamb into the mainstream and to a generation of soldiers who ate enough tinned and boiled mutton in two wars to last a lifetime. The dish belongs to seasonal logic of the older kind: a long, wet, low-attention cooking method that heats the kitchen and stretches one joint across a Sunday dinner and the week's soup pot.