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Mutton, Fillet of, with Tomatoes
Cut some slices from a cold leg of mutton, season with pepper and salt, broil over a clear fire. Make some tomato sauce, pour it over the meat, and serve very hot.
A leftovers dish rather than a joint: thick slices off a cooked leg, grilled hot and sauced. It succeeds or fails on the sauce and on not drying out already-cooked meat.
- "Fillet" is not the cut you thinkIn Victorian usage a fillet of mutton could simply mean a thick, boneless slice carved from the leg, which is what is meant here. Cut them a good half-inch thick; thin slices dry out to leather over a grill.
- Broil means direct heatA "clear fire" is a coal or wood fire burned down past the smoke to steady radiant heat. Use a very hot grill or an overhead broiler at full heat, close to the element.
- The meat is already cookedYou are colouring and heating it, not cooking it through. A minute or two per side is enough; longer and the leg meat squeezes out what juice it has left.
- Mutton or lambTrue mutton, sheep over a year or two old, is sold mainly by specialist butchers now. Cold roast leg of lamb works in its place, with a slightly milder, less musky flavour.
- Tomato sauceThe recipe assumes a cooked sauce made to a separate receipt rather than a bottled condiment; period tomato sauces were generally tomatoes stewed down and sieved, often with onion and a little stock or butter. Have it finished and hot before the meat goes on, since the meat cannot wait.
- ServingReckon two thick slices a person. Warm the plates and pour the sauce over at the table, as cold plates undo the whole point of the instruction to serve very hot.
Nineteenth-century English households roasted large joints and expected to eat them for several days, and books like Cassell's devote a great deal of space to what to do on days two and three. Reheated mutton was a standing problem: warmed through in gravy it tasted of the day before, so recipes of this kind suggest that cooks browned it hard over a fire to give it a fresh surface and covered the dryness with something sharp. Tomato sauce filled that role, joining the older stable of caper, onion and piquant brown sauces used for the same purpose. The dish belongs to the tradition of thrift cookery rather than to any regional cuisine, and its presence in a general dictionary of cookery reflects how much of the household cook's real work was re-presenting cold meat.