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Boiled Mutton with Caper: Sauce
Have ready a pot of boiling water, and throw in a handful of salt; wash a leg of mutton and rub salt through it. If it is to be rare, cook about two hours; if well done, three hours or longer,, according to size. Boil a pint of milk, thicken with flour well blended, add butter, salt, pepper and two table-spoons of capers, or mint sauce if preferred. - Mrs. E. L. F.
A plain boiled joint with a caper white sauce, written for cooks who knew what a leg of mutton was and how long their own range took. Two things need translating: the meat itself, and the fact that the liquid should never actually boil.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is sheep older than about a year (often two or more) — darker, firmer, stronger in flavour, and hard to find outside halal butchers and some farm suppliers. A 5-7 lb leg of lamb behaves similarly but is more tender and cooks faster.
- Do not boil itThe hinge of the dish. Bring the pot to a boil, add the meat, then drop the heat so the surface only shivers, around 180-190F. A hard boil for two hours squeezes a leg dry and stringy no matter how good the sheep was.
- The timingsTwo to three hours is right for a large mutton leg at a bare simmer. It will not be "rare" in any modern sense — boiled meat comes out uniformly cooked through. For lamb, reckon roughly 20 minutes per pound and pull it at 145-150F at the thickest point, away from the bone.
- Salting the meat"Rub salt through it" means working salt into the surface and the cut face around the bone. A handful of salt is imprecise — anywhere from about 2 to 4 tablespoons for a large stockpot; the meat will not take up much of it in a few hours.
- The caper sauceThis is a béchamel by another route. For a pint of milk, "flour well blended" means about 2 tablespoons of flour slaked in a little cold milk before it goes into the hot, plus 2 tablespoons of butter. Simmer it 3-4 minutes after it thickens to cook out the raw flour taste, then add the capers off the heat so they keep their bite.
- Better with the cooking liquorSome period recipes replace part of the milk with the broth from the pot. Half milk, half strained skimmed liquor makes a more interesting sauce than milk alone.
- SkimNothing in the original says so, but a leg throws a great deal of grey scum in the first twenty minutes. Skim it off or it settles back onto the meat.
- Mint sauce as the alternativeThe mint sauce meant here is the English kind — chopped mint steeped in vinegar with a little sugar — not a creamed sauce. The original's wording is ambiguous, though mint sauce is normally offered separately rather than stirred into the milk.
- YieldThe original gives no weight, but a leg of the size assumed here serves 8-10. Let it stand 15 minutes before carving, and carve across the grain in thin slices.
Boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce was one of the fixed points of nineteenth-century Anglo-American cooking — a joint that fed a large table, needed no oven, and could sit in its pot while the rest of dinner was finished. Capers, the pickled flower buds of the Mediterranean caper bush, were an imported store-cupboard item that reached American kitchens in small glass jars, and their sharpness was there to cut the fat and muttony strength of an older animal; the mint-and-vinegar alternative does the same job by different means. That Buckeye Cookery (first published in Ohio in 1876 and reissued through the 1880s) prints it under a contributor's initials is typical of the book, which was assembled from recipes sent in by churchwomen. The dish faded in America along with mutton itself, as sheep farming shifted toward wool and then toward young lamb sold at a few months old.