Home › The Principles of Cookery › Mutton, Leg of, to Marinade
Mutton, Leg of, to Marinade
Get the skin taken off the leg, and with three or four large juicy onions, which should be halved, rub the mutton until it is well impregnated with their juice. Afterwards lay it into a marinade of the following ingredients. Four cloves of garlic, a dozen or more of bruised peppercorns, and four cloves, a bunch of herbs, and one of parsley, with a dessert-spoonful of salt, infused in equal quantities of vinegar and water (a quart in all). The dish should be from five to six inches in depth, that the marinade may surround the meat well. Keep it in this twenty-four hours, then again rub it with four more fresh onions, and return it, this time on the other side, to the marinade for the same space of time. Hang to drain all the next day, then wipe dry, and roast the leg in a buttered paper, and serve with red currant jelly. Time, three hours to roast.
A three-day preparation for a cut most butchers no longer stock. The marinade is doing two jobs at once: tenderising an old, hard-worked leg and pushing it toward the flavour of venison, which was the fashionable point of a marinaded mutton.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is sheep over two years old, firm-grained and strongly flavoured; it is sold today mainly by halal and specialist butchers. Hogget (one to two years) is the closest common substitute, and a plain leg of lamb will need far less than the full 48 hours of acid or it will go mealy.
- Keep it coldThe original assumes a cold larder in a cold season. Marinade and drain the leg in the refrigerator throughout, in a non-reactive dish -- glass, glazed earthenware or stainless -- since vinegar will pit aluminium and pick up metallic flavours.
- The two kinds of clove"Four cloves of garlic" and "four cloves" are different things: four peeled garlic cloves, and four whole clove buds, the spice. Four buds in a quart of liquid is plenty; more will dominate.
- MeasuresA dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons, roughly 10 g of salt. "A quart in all" is an imperial quart, about 1.1 litres, half vinegar and half water; a US quart of 950 ml is near enough. Scale up if the leg is not covered.
- The onion rubThe halved onions are being used as an abrasive and a juice source, not an ingredient -- the cut faces are crushed against the bare meat until the surface is wet. This is the step that carries flavour into a leg with the skin (the fell) removed, and it is worth doing properly both times.
- Buttered paperButtered kitchen paper wrapped round the joint was a standard period protection against a scorched surface. Buttered parchment tied with string does the same; foil will steam the meat rather than protect it.
- Roasting timeThree hours suits a large mutton leg of eight or nine pounds in a coal range. Modern practice is to work to internal temperature rather than the clock: a leg of hogget or lamb is done at about 145F for pink and 160F for well done, and a five-pound leg will get there well inside two hours at 350F.
- ServingA whole leg of this size feeds eight to ten. The red currant jelly is not optional garnish -- it is the sweet counterweight to a joint that has spent two days in vinegar, and the same accompaniment that would have gone with the venison this dish is imitating.
Marinading a leg of mutton was, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, frankly an imitation: the vinegar, garlic, peppercorns and cloves were meant to give cheap sheep the high, gamey character of venison, and the red currant jelly at the end is the tell, since that was the standard sauce for deer. The technique also solved a practical problem. Mutton reaching an ordinary kitchen was frequently from an old animal, and a long acid soak plus the abrasive onion rub was the most reliable way to make such a leg carve well. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households running on a budget but aspiring to a gentleman's table, carries these transformations -- and the three-day timetable it assumes says as much about the Victorian larder, cold and in constant use, as it does about the meat.