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MUTTON (cooked like Venison)
A fillet or neck of mutton, if prepared by being well hung (in cold weather, at least seven or eight days), and then steeped for a day or two in a mixture of vinegar and red wine, three or four bay-leaves, and the same of shredded shallots, will be found nearly equal to venison. Half an ounce of black pepper and allspice, pounded, should be well rubbed into the meat before steeping. When to be cooked, it should be washed in warm water, wiped dry, and enclosed in a paste of flour and water, which should be removed a quarter of an hour before serving. Dredge lightly with flour, sprinkle with salt, and baste until of a light brown colour. Send good gravy to table in a tureen, seasoned only with salt, and unmelted currant jelly, on a plate.
This is less a recipe than a technique: age, marinate and roast mutton so that it eats like venison. Two things carry it — a genuinely cold, airy aging period and the flour-paste jacket that keeps the lean meat from drying out.
- Age and marinate cold, not merely "in cold weather"The seven or eight days of hanging assumed an unheated winter larder, and the marinating days assumed the same. Do both in a refrigerator; meat held at room temperature for a week is not what the book intends.
- Mutton itselfTrue mutton (sheep over two years) is sold mainly by halal butchers and some farm suppliers. Hogget or a mature leg or shoulder of lamb will stand in, but lamb is milder and more tender, so shorten the steeping to 24 hours and expect less venison character.
- "Fillet or neck"Fillet here means the thick end of the leg or the loin, cut boneless; neck means the whole neck end including the best end of the rack. The leg is the easier joint for this treatment.
- The marinade proportions are not givenThe original names vinegar and red wine without ratio or quantity. A workable reading is one part red wine vinegar to three or four parts red wine, enough to half-submerge the joint, turning it twice a day. Any more vinegar and the surface goes grey and mushy.
- Half an ounce of spiceThat is about 14 g of pounded black pepper and allspice combined, in the region of five or six teaspoons, for a joint of several pounds. It sounds heavy and is meant to; most of it stays on the surface and is washed off before roasting.
- The paste is armour, not pastryFlour and water mixed to a stiff dough, rolled out and wrapped round the joint, is huff paste. It is not eaten. Roast the wrapped joint at about 325-350F, allow roughly 20-25 minutes per pound, then strip the paste off, dredge, salt and baste for the final 15 minutes with the oven at 425F to colour it.
- Cook to temperatureAim for 130-135F at the centre for pink, 145F for medium; the paste means you cannot judge by looks until it comes off, so use a thermometer. If you rest the joint, note that the original allows only a quarter of an hour between stripping the paste and sending it to table.
- At tableThe gravy is plain meat gravy seasoned with salt only, served separately, and the redcurrant jelly goes to the table in its jar-set state rather than warmed into a sauce. A 5 lb leg serves six to eight.
Dressing mutton as mock venison was a standard trick of English country cookery from the eighteenth century onward, and versions of it appear in eighteenth-century books, Hannah Glasse's among them. Venison was not something a cook could buy reliably — deer were protected by their own deer-stealing statutes, and in practice the meat moved through deer parks, landowners and gifts between households; mutton from an older sheep, hung until it darkened and then steeped in wine, vinegar and shallot, gave a passable imitation of that gamy depth. The flour-and-water paste belongs to the same tradition of roasting lean joints — venison haunches were routinely armoured the same way to stop the surface drying before the middle was done. At bottom it is a lesson in what hanging and acid marinades do to muscle, a piece of kitchen chemistry a reader could apply elsewhere.