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Kid, Roast
Soak the kid in a marinade as before directed (see KID); then bind strips of fat bacon round it, and cover it with buttered paper. Put it down to a clear fire, and baste liberally. About half an hour before it is done enough, remove the paper and bacon, dredge some flour over the kid, and continue the basting as before. Dissolve one table-spoonful of red-currant jelly in half a pint of mutton gravy, add a wine-glassful of claret, and send the sauce to table in a tureen. Time, according to size: to roast a very young sucking kid will take about an hour and a half. Probable cost, uncertain, kids being seldom offered for sale. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
KIDNEY AND BEEF STEAK PUDDING. (See BEEF STEAK AND KIDNEY PUDDING.)
A spit-roast recipe that assumes an open fire and a butcher who occasionally has kid. Both are solvable, but the meat is the part that needs thought.
- The hinge: fat, or it driesKid is very lean, with almost none of the intramuscular fat of lamb. The bacon barding and the constant basting are not decoration — remove them and a young carcass or leg will be dry and stringy well before it is cooked through.
- Sourcing the meatMilk-fed kid of the sort meant here (a few weeks old, still suckling) comes from halal and Latin American butchers, Italian butchers around Easter, and some farm suppliers. What is sold as "goat" in most markets is older and tougher; a leg or shoulder from a 6–12 month animal wants a covered, slow braise rather than this treatment.
- The marinade it refers toThe cross-reference is to Cassell's separate KID entry, not printed here. Marinades of this period typically run to oil, vinegar or wine, sliced onion, bay, thyme, parsley and peppercorns, with the meat turned in it for a day or two. Any red-wine and herb marinade of that type serves.
- Fire to ovenFor a spit or rotisserie, a clear fire means well-burnt-down coals with no flame licking the meat. In an oven, roast at 325–350F, covered with buttered parchment and foil, uncovering for the last 30 minutes exactly as written.
- Time and temperatureAn hour and a half suits a whole sucking kid, which will be a small carcass. Cook to internal temperature rather than the clock: 145-150F at the thickest part of the leg for a young animal, or push a bone-in shoulder to 190F if you want it falling apart.
- The dredgeFlouring the surface once the bacon comes off, then basting over it, builds the browned crust that the covered stage prevented. Use a fine dredge and give it time to colour, or the flour tastes raw.
- Sauce measuresHalf a pint is 10 fl oz Imperial, so use 1¼ cups of stock; a wine-glassful is roughly 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Mutton gravy is not something most kitchens have — a well-reduced lamb stock, or roasting-pan juices deglazed and strengthened with lamb stock, gives the same effect.
- YieldSix to eight, as stated, from a whole small kid. A single 4–5 lb leg feeds four.
Kid was familiar to British cooks in earlier centuries and had all but disappeared from the market by the time Cassell's was compiled, which is exactly what the entry's odd little note — "probable cost, uncertain, kids being seldom offered for sale" — records. Goat kept in Britain was chiefly a dairy and smallholder animal, and the male kids that came of it seem to have been eaten locally more often than sold through city butchers, so a metropolitan cookery dictionary could describe the dish while admitting it could not price it. The sauce is the giveaway that this is being handled as a substitute for lamb: red-currant jelly, mutton gravy and claret are the standard Victorian accompaniment to roast mutton and lamb, applied unchanged to a leaner meat. Kid remains ordinary eating around the Mediterranean, in the Caribbean and across South Asia, and in Britain and America it has returned mainly through those communities and through dairy-goat farms selling the male kids that would otherwise be waste.