Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Boiled Mutton
Boiled Mutton
Wipe leg of mutton, put on fire, barely covered with boiling water, and let boil about 10 minutes, then simmer until tender; season with salt when half cooked. A few slices of onion, turnip, and carrot, or 2 or 3 stalks of celery, may be added while cooking. When tender, brush over the meat with melted Crisco and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley. Serve with caper sauce which is made as follows: Mix 2 tablespoons Crisco with 1 tablespoon flour; add 1 cup boiling water; stir it over fire until thick; add to it 1 hard-cooked egg chopped fine and 2 tablespoons of capers.
A plain English boiled joint, written for a shortening-company cookbook and therefore rendered entirely in Crisco. The method is sound; the fat and the meat are both worth rethinking.
- Keep it below a boilThe initial ten minutes at a rolling boil sets the surface; after that the water should barely tremble, around 180-185F. A leg held at a true boil turns stringy and squeezes out its juices.
- Mutton means lamb nowMutton, sheep over two years old, is rare outside halal and specialist butchers. A 5-6 lb leg of lamb behaves the same way but cooks faster and tastes milder; genuine mutton wants a longer, slower simmer.
- TimingReckon roughly 20 minutes per pound at a simmer for lamb, longer for mutton, and test by feel rather than clock - the meat should give easily when pierced near the bone. That is about two hours for a leg of this size.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, launched in 1911 and the reason this book exists. Butter is the better choice in both the sauce and the finishing brush; the recipe was written to prove shortening could stand in for it.
- Use the cooking liquorThe caper sauce as written is a roux slackened with plain boiling water, which is thin stuff. A cup of the strained mutton broth in place of the water gives the sauce the body and savour the dish assumes.
- Capers and their brineDrain the capers but keep a teaspoon of the brine or vinegar to stir in at the end. The acidity is the whole point of the sauce against rich sheep meat.
- Salting halfwayThe instruction to salt when half cooked follows the old rule that salting the water at the start draws juice out of the meat. Season the sauce separately and taste it, since the broth will already carry salt.
- YieldA 5-6 lb leg serves six to eight, with cold meat left over. The vegetables simmered alongside are there for the broth rather than the plate; cook fresh ones to serve.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s and 20s: the manufacturer's cookbook, written by a professional cookery author and given away or sold cheaply to teach households a new product. Every recipe in it calls for Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, which is why a dish that for two centuries would have been finished with butter is brushed here with vegetable fat. The dish itself is much older and thoroughly English - boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce is attested in British cookery books from the eighteenth century onward, and pickled nasturtium seeds, broom buds and samphire were the cheap domestic substitutes for imported capers, sharp things to cut the fat of an older sheep. Its presence in an American book of the period is a reminder that mutton was still ordinary butcher's meat in the United States; it fell out of favour after the Second World War, and the recipe now reads as a small record of a taste that has largely disappeared.