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Mutton, Leg of, with Potatoes
This homely mode of cooking a leg of mutton is not to be set aside because of its simplicity. If baked carefully, and cooked to the right point as it ought to be, a feat not always accomplished when baked at the common oven, it will be found excellent, particularly the potatoes, as they will have absorbed all the dripping of the joint, and, where economy in the use of meat as a family dinner is concerned, the potatoes will satisfy the appetite, especially of children, without encroaching largely on the joint. Everybody will allow that the odour of the working man's Sunday dinner is most tempting to the appetite; but, barring the question of fire, we do not think it the most economical of dishes. Time, a quarter of an hour to the pound. Probable cost, 1s. per pound. Sufficient, a leg of mutton of moderate size for eight or more persons.
An entry more discursive than instructive, but the method is plain enough: the joint is set above sliced potatoes so the dripping falls into them, and the whole thing bakes as one. A few of the assumptions behind it need translating.
- "The common oven"This does not mean an ordinary domestic range. It means the commercial baker's oven, where households without an oven of their own sent their Sunday joint to be cooked for a few pence. The complaint about it not being "cooked to the right point" is a complaint about handing your dinner to a stranger with a falling oven.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven heat at all. A steady moderate to fairly brisk oven, around 375-400F, suits the dish: too low and the potatoes stew in fat rather than crisping; too high and the outside of the leg is dry before the middle is done.
- The timingA quarter of an hour to the pound produces a distinctly pink leg by modern reckoning, and the mutton meant here would have come from an older animal than the lamb now sold. For a 5 lb leg, 15 minutes per pound plus 20-25 minutes gives roughly medium. Cook to internal temperature rather than the clock: 145-150F at the thickest part, away from the bone, then rest 15-20 minutes.
- Mutton versus lambMutton means sheep over about two years old: darker, stronger, and needing longer and gentler cooking than lamb. It is sold now mainly by specialist butchers. A leg of lamb substitutes directly but will taste milder and cook a little faster.
- Setting up the panPeel and slice the potatoes thickly into a roasting tin, season, and set the joint on a rack directly above them so the fat drips through. If your leg has little fat of its own, a spoonful of dripping over the potatoes at the start prevents the top layer drying out before the meat renders.
- Getting the potatoes rightThe dish lives or dies on them. Turn the potatoes once, halfway, so the underside browns rather than sitting in liquid, and if they are still pale when the meat comes out, give them ten minutes alone at 425F while the joint rests.
- Cost and yieldThe shilling a pound is a period price and tells you only that mutton was a substantial purchase. "Eight or more persons" assumes the potatoes are doing much of the work; a 5 lb leg with two or three pounds of potatoes will feed six to eight comfortably.
The picture here is a specific and well-documented one: the working-class Sunday dinner carried through the streets to the neighbourhood bakehouse. Bakers were not baking bread on Sundays, but their ovens held heat, and for a penny or two they would cook a family's joint and potatoes in a tin brought from home, to be collected at midday. Nineteenth-century social writing and parliamentary evidence on Sunday baking both record the practice, and the tempting odour Cassell's mentions was a genuine feature of Sunday mornings in industrial towns. The book's slight sniff at its economy is characteristic: the compilers are addressing a household that has its own range and coals, and are weighing fuel against meat in a way that a tenement family, paying twopence to borrow someone else's fire, could not. What survives of the dish in Britain today is the tray of potatoes cooked under the roast.