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MUTTON AND TOMATOES (au Gratin)
A shallow pie-dish, or better still a flat dish, should be buttered and sprinkled with bread-crumbs and grated cheese, seasoned with cayenne and a hint of nutmeg. Then put in a layer of sliced tomatoes, quite ripe, skinned and scalded; next some slices of cooked mutton, rather thin and underdone. Add more cheese and seasoning, then moisten with a little brown stock, cover with bread-crumbs and grated cheese, and bake for a few minutes in the oven until slightly browned.
A leftovers dish from the days when a Sunday joint fed the household for three days. It works, but the original gives no quantities, no temperature and no time.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature, only "a few minutes... until slightly browned" with everything already cooked, which implies a hot oven; around 425-450F suits it. At 350F the crumbs will likely not colour before the mutton dries out, so finishing under the broiler is an alternative.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. For a shallow dish serving four, about 1 lb ripe tomatoes, 12 oz cooked mutton or lamb, 3-4 oz grated cheese in total, and a handful of dry breadcrumbs works; roughly comparable weights of meat and tomato keep the layers in balance.
- "Skinned and scalded"Redundant as written — scalding is how you loosen the skin. Drop the tomatoes in boiling water for 20-30 seconds, slip off the skins, then slice. Salt the slices and drain them for ten minutes or the finished gratin will be watery.
- The cheeseAn unspecified "grated cheese" in a British book of this kind would most likely have been a dry, sharp Cheddar or Cheshire, though Parmesan was also used and works well for the crumb topping. Avoid anything young and wet, which will string rather than brown.
- Underdone muttonThe instruction that matters most: slice the meat thin and use it pink. It gets only a few minutes of heat, so it will not tenderise — thick or well-done slices come out grey and leathery. Lamb from a rare-roasted leg or shoulder is the modern equivalent.
- Brown stockA dark beef or lamb stock. Use 3-4 tablespoons only — just enough to moisten. Leftover gravy, thinned, will do as well.
- SeasoningCayenne and nutmeg with mutton and cheese is a Victorian signature, and a light hand is intended: a pinch of each per layer, not a teaspoon.
- YieldOn the quantities suggested above, four as a light lunch or supper dish. It does not reheat well; the tomatoes collapse.
This is a dish built from meat already cooked, of the sort any household roasting a large joint on Sunday needed several of by Wednesday. Au gratin refers not to cheese as such but to the browned crust, from the French gratter, to scrape, the name often traced to the crisp scrapings from the dish; cheese and breadcrumbs became the standard means to that end. Mutton — stronger and coarser than lamb, the meat of a mature sheep — was the everyday British roast of the period, and its assertive flavour is why the recipe reaches for cayenne, nutmeg and sharp cheese rather than anything more delicate. Tomatoes appear here as a mark of how quickly they had moved from suspicion to staple in English kitchens over the nineteenth century.