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Kid
A young sucking kid, well cooked, forms an excellent dish, and is generally dressed whole, like a hare. If grown to any size, it should be jointed before cooking. As it is a dry meat it should be either soaked in a marinade for a few hours, and afterwards hung up for a day or two, or larded before being roasted. The marinade may be made of one pint of vinegar, one pint of cold water, half a pint of port or claret, two ounces of salt, two ounces of moist sugar, twelve peppercorns, and a bay-leaf. Place the kid in this, baste it frequently, and wash it in the marinade once or twice when it is hung up after being taken out.
An entry rather than a numbered recipe: it tells you how to treat kid before it goes near the fire, and gives a marinade with real quantities. The hinge is that kid is lean to the point of dryness, so everything here is about getting fat and moisture into it.
- What kid is, and what to buyKid is young goat, usually under six months. A "sucking kid" is a milk-fed animal of perhaps 10-15 lb dressed; halal and Caribbean butchers are the reliable source, and spring is the usual season. A whole one will not fit most domestic ovens, so a shoulder, leg or boned saddle is the practical unit.
- The marinade in modern measuresAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so read this as 2 1/2 cups vinegar, 2 1/2 cups water, 1 1/4 cups port or claret, 2 oz salt (about 3 tablespoons fine salt, more if flaked or kosher), 2 oz (about 1/4 cup) sugar, 12 peppercorns and a bay leaf. That is roughly 4 per cent salt by weight of liquid, a seasoning brine rather than a cure.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined sugar still carrying molasses. Light brown sugar is the closest modern equivalent.
- HangingThe instruction to hang the meat for a day or two assumes a cold larder in a house without central heating. Do this in a refrigerator at 34-40F, on a rack over a tray, and treat the two days as an outside limit. Meat left at room temperature after a wet marinade is a straightforward spoilage risk.
- Larding versus bardingLarding needles are scarce and the technique is fiddly. Wrapping the joint in thin sheets of pork back fat or streaky bacon, or laying strips over the surface and tying them on, achieves the same end: fat melting into meat that has almost none of its own.
- RoastingA lean young joint wants a hot start and a moderate finish: 425F for 15-20 minutes, then 325-350F, basting often. Pull a leg or shoulder at 145-150F internal for pink meat. Kid that has passed 165F on a roast is exactly the dry meat this entry warns about.
- The alternative to roastingAnything older than a milk-fed kid is better jointed and braised for two to three hours at 300-325F in stock and wine. The connective tissue that makes older goat chewy only yields to long moist heat.
- YieldAllow about 12 oz bone-in kid per person. A 4 lb shoulder feeds four to five.
Cassell's was compiled for British households at a time when goat was rare on the national table, which is why the entry has to explain kid by analogy with hare — a familiar lean, dark, dry-fleshed roast that also needed marinating and larding. Kid was eaten across the Mediterranean, the Middle East and the Caribbean. Marinades of this kind — acid, wine, salt, sugar and spice — appear repeatedly in nineteenth-century books for meat thought too lean or too strong, used both to season and, it was believed, to tenderise. Modern work suggests acidic marinades soften only the outer few millimetres, so the larding advice in the same paragraph is doing most of the real work.