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MUTTON GIGOT (a la Gascon)
Choose a tender well-hung bit of mutton. Blanch two or three cloves of garlic in several waters slightly salted, and remove the heads, tails, and bones of six anchovies. Lard the meat with the garlic and anchovies, roast the usual time, and serve with garlic sauce made as follows. Divide a dozen cloves of garlic, and take off their skins. Put them into slightly-salted boiling water, and, to make mild garlic sauce, change the water every five or six minutes until the garlic has lost its peculiar flavour and small. Serve it like onion sauce, or drain and serve it in the dish with the meat. Time, twenty to twenty-five minutes to boil. Sufficient for one pint of sauce.
A roast leg larded with garlic and anchovy, served with a garlic sauce that has been boiled mild. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to roast a joint, so the numbers below fill the gaps.
- GigotThe French word for the whole leg. A leg of mutton ran 6-8 lb; a modern leg of lamb is nearer 5-6 lb and will serve six to eight.
- Mutton is now hard to findTrue mutton is sheep over two years old, with darker, stronger meat. Most butchers sell lamb under a year; hogget (one to two years) is the closest substitute and stands up better to the garlic and anchovy.
- "Well-hung"Period butchers dry-aged carcasses for one to three weeks in a cold larder. Supermarket lamb has usually had little or no ageing; ask a butcher for an aged leg if you want the flavour the recipe assumes.
- Larding, here, is not lardingDespite the word, no fat is being inserted. Make deep incisions with a thin knife and push in slivers of blanched garlic and pieces of anchovy. A larding needle is not necessary.
- The anchoviesSix salted whole anchovies is what is meant, hence the heads, tails and bones. Twelve tinned fillets in oil, blotted dry, do the same work with no preparation.
- Blanching the garlicChanging the water repeatedly leaches out the pungent sulphur compounds and leaves the cloves sweet and soft. Five or six minutes per change, three or four changes, is what the recipe intends; taste a clove to judge.
- "Roast the usual time"The recipe gives no oven setting. By modern practice, a bone-in leg at 350F (175C) after a hot start takes roughly 20 minutes per pound; 135F internal gives pink, higher if you want it cooked through, and rest 20 minutes.
- "Serve it like onion sauce"Victorian onion sauce is boiled onions chopped or sieved into a white sauce, so the sauce here is the softened garlic worked into about a pint of bechamel.
- A pint of sauceAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, about 2 1/2 US cups. That is generous for one leg; half the quantity is usually plenty.
Gascony, in the southwest of France, is garlic country, and "a la Gascon(ne)" on a nineteenth-century English menu often signalled garlic, anchovy or both. The pairing of lamb with garlic and salted fish is older than the name: anchovy was a common savoury seasoning in English kitchens throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it appears frequently in Cassell's as anchovy essence, anchovy butter and anchovy paste. What is most telling here is the effort spent taming the garlic. Repeated blanchings in fresh salted water until it has "lost its peculiar flavour" suggests a readership that wanted the aroma of the dish without its assertiveness, at a period when garlic was often regarded in English households as a foreign and slightly suspect ingredient.