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Kabobs, Mutton
This is an Indian dish, and is usually made of mutton, veal, or fowl. Its peculiarity is that it is cut into pieces, seasoned rather highly, then fastened together with skewers, and thus both cooked and served. For mutton kabobs, take either the loin or the best end of the neck. Remove the skin and fat, and cut the meat into steaks. Mix half a pint of fine bread-crumbs with a small nutmeg, grated, a dessert-spoonful of powdered mixed herbs, a table-spoonful of salt, a tea-spoonful of pepper, and a small pinch of cayenne. Beat the yolks of three eggs. Dip the chops into these, and afterwards into the bread-crumbs, twice. Fasten them together in the position in which they were before they were cut, put a skewer through them, tie them to the spit, and roast before a clear fire. Baste them liberally with some good dripping and the contents of the pan. Have half a pint of good brown gravy, thickened and flavoured, ready to pour over the mutton before sending it to table. Time, an hour and a half to roast. Probable cost, if made with four pounds of the loin of mutton, 4s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian Anglo-Indian joint rather than anything a modern cook would call a kebab: the meat is cut into chops, crumbed, then skewered back into the shape of the original piece and roasted whole. Most of the work is in the reassembly and the fire.
- The hinge: reassemble tightlyThe crumbed surfaces end up sandwiched between the chops rather than exposed to the fire. Press the chops firmly together in their original order and skewer them so the joint cannot splay open as the fat renders.
- Cuts"Best end of the neck" is what a butcher now sells as a rack of lamb; the loin is the loin. Mutton, meaning sheep over about two years old, is stocked by halal butchers and some farm suppliers but is not a supermarket item. Lamb will work and will cook noticeably faster.
- MeasuresAn imperial half-pint of breadcrumbs is about 1¼ US cups, loosely filled. The half-pint of gravy is roughly 1¼ cups. A dessertspoon is two teaspoons.
- The saltA tablespoon of salt in 1¼ cups of crumbs is heavy even allowing for the crumbs being a coating rather than a stuffing. Two teaspoons of fine salt is closer to modern palates, and less again if using a salted commercial breadcrumb.
- Spit to ovenRoasting before a clear fire means an open fire burnt down bright and smokeless, with the joint turning in front of it and a dripping pan beneath. A rotisserie attachment is the direct equivalent; otherwise roast on a rack over a tray at 375F, basting with the pan drippings every fifteen minutes or so.
- Time and temperatureAn hour and a half suits a four-pound reassembled loin of mutton. Go by a thermometer pushed into the centre of the block of chops rather than the clock: 145F for pink, 160F if you want it as thoroughly done as the period expected. Lamb of the same weight may reach that half an hour early.
- DrippingBeef dripping was a common basting fat and gives the right savour; melted butter clarified, or the mutton's own trimmed fat rendered in the pan, both stand in. The recipe assumes you also baste with what has collected under the joint.
- ServingFive to six portions. Carve down between the skewered chops so each person gets one with its crumb layer intact. The recipe has the half-pint of brown gravy poured over the joint before it goes to table.
Kabob reaches English from the Persian and Arabic kabāb, by way of Urdu and the households of the East India Company, and by the 1870s it was familiar enough in Britain to appear in a general dictionary of cookery, though Cassell's still tells its reader that "This is an Indian dish" and explains what makes it peculiar. What Cassell's describes, though, is an English roast wearing the name: the essential kebab idea of meat threaded on a skewer over fire has been bent to fit the British spit and the British joint, with the chops crumbed, reassembled and served whole under brown gravy. Curry powder, mulligatawny and kedgeree took similar journeys, arriving as returning-colonial dishes and settling into the standard repertoire in anglicised form; curry powder and mulligatawny were current in Britain well before the 1870s, commercial curry powder from the late eighteenth century. The costing here — four shillings for a four-pound loin, feeding five or six — places it as a respectable middle-class dinner of the sort Cassell's readers were expected to put on without a French cook.</p>