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Leg of Mutton A La Venison
Remove all rough fat from a leg of mutton, lay in a deep earthen dish, and rub into the meat very thoroughly the following mixture: One table-spoon salt, one each of celery, salt, brown sugar, black pepper, made mustard, allspice, and sweet herbs mixed and powdered. After these have been rubbed into all parts of meat, pour over it slowly a tea-cup good vinegar, cover tightly and set in a cool place for four or five days, turning ham, and basting it with liquid three or four times a day. To cook, leave in a clean kettle a quart boiling water, have in kettle an inverted tin-pan or rack made for the purpose; on it lay ham just as taken out of pickle; cover kettle tightly, and stew for four hours. Do not allow water to touch the meat. Add a tea-cup of hot water to the pickle and baste the ham with it. When ready to serve, thicken the liquid in the kettle with flour, strain through a fine strainer, and serve the meat with it and a relish of currant jelly.
A leg of mutton marinated for several days in vinegar and spice, then steamed over water rather than boiled in it. Two things carry the dish: the meat must never touch the water, and the marinade needs real refrigeration.
- Steam, do not boilThe inverted pan or rack keeps the leg above a quart of simmering water in a tightly covered kettle. If the water rises to touch the meat you are boiling mutton and the spice crust washes off. Check the water level hourly and top up with boiling water.
- Four or five days needs a refrigeratorA nineteenth-century "cool place" meant a cellar or springhouse in cold weather. Do the marinating in the refrigerator at or below 40F, in a covered non-reactive dish, and turn and baste once or twice a day rather than three or four times.
- "Ham" here means the legThe recipe switches from "leg of mutton" to "ham" partway through. It is the same piece of meat throughout; ham in this older sense is simply the hind leg.
- Mutton and its substituteTrue mutton, from a sheep over two years old, is stronger and leaner than lamb and is hard to find outside halal and specialty butchers. A bone-in leg of lamb of 5 to 7 lb works, though the gamey character the recipe is chasing will be milder.
- Tea-cup and table-spoonA nineteenth-century tea-cup is usually reckoned somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz, so the vinegar quantity is approximate; start with about half a cup. The spice list most likely reads oddly because of a stray comma: one tablespoon salt plus one tablespoon each of celery salt, brown sugar, black pepper, made mustard, allspice, and mixed sweet herbs.
- Made mustard and sweet herbs"Made mustard" is prepared mustard paste, not dry powder. "Sweet herbs" was a loose term for a mix of mild dried herbs, typically including thyme, marjoram, savory or parsley; the recipe wants them mixed and powdered fine so they cling to the meat.
- Four hours is for muttonOld mutton on the bone genuinely wants that long. A modern leg of lamb will be tender and sliceable well before four hours; take it to about 175 to 180F internal for the falling-apart texture the dish intends, or pull it at 145F if you want it pink, which is not what the recipe describes.
- The gravyThe liquid in the kettle is the steaming water plus drippings, not the marinade. Thicken it with a tablespoon or two of flour slaked in cold water, strain, and serve alongside currant jelly. The reserved pickle, stretched with hot water, is only for basting.
- YieldA 6 lb bone-in leg serves eight to ten, and the meat is better the second day, sliced cold.
Dressing mutton to taste like venison was a standing preoccupation of Anglo-American cookery through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when wild deer was a prized flavour and domestic sheep was more readily had. English books of the period give recipes "to make a leg of mutton eat like venison," usually by hanging the meat, then steeping it in vinegar or red wine with spice until it darkened and took on a high, faintly gamey edge; the currant jelly served alongside is the traditional venison accompaniment, borrowed here to complete the illusion. The Buckeye books grew out of a compilation made in Marysville, Ohio, first issued in 1876 as The Centennial Buckeye Cook Book and reissued from 1877 as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping; they belong to a settled Midwestern world where deer had grown scarce and mutton was plentiful, so the substitution ran in the useful direction. The steaming method — meat on a rack above water in a covered kettle — was also practical for a coal or wood range, where a long, low, even heat was easier to hold on the stovetop than in the oven.