Home › The Principles of Cookery › Mutton, Minced, with Red Cabbage
Mutton, Minced, with Red Cabbage
Mince the remains of cold roast mutton, and flavour with chopped onion, pepper and salt. Make a little good thickened gravy, put in the meat, and let it simmer very slowly for twenty minutes. Arrange in the centre of a dish, with a few sippets on top and red cabbage round as a border. To cook the cabbage it should be put into boiling salted water, and boiled for half an hour, then drained, chopped up, and fried in a little butter till tender, then well peppered.
A Victorian second-day dish: cold roast mutton reheated in gravy and ringed with buttered red cabbage. The whole thing depends on gentle heat and a gravy with enough body to hold the meat together.
- Never let it boilAlready-cooked mutton toughens fast in a rolling simmer. Keep the gravy at the barest tremble for the twenty minutes given, just long enough to heat the meat and let the onion soften into it.
- Mince means chopped, not groundIn this period the instruction points to hand-chopping the cold joint with a knife, or passing it through a mincer on the coarse plate. A food processor reduces it to paste; pulse briefly or chop by hand for texture.
- Cook the onion firstFinely chopped raw onion may still taste sharp after twenty minutes in barely simmering gravy. Sweating it in a little butter or dripping before the meat goes in is safer, though the recipe as written puts it in raw.
- Thickened gravyMeat juices from the original roast, thickened with a roux or a little flour, and let down with stock. Aim for something that coats the meat rather than pools around it; the recipe specifies only 'a little'.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread fried in butter or dripping until crisp, arranged over the meat. Toast works but goes soft against the gravy much sooner.
- The red cabbageHalf an hour of boiling leaves it grey-purple and limp by modern taste. Ten to fifteen minutes gets it tender enough for the subsequent frying, and a splash of vinegar in the water helps hold the colour, which alkaline tap water otherwise dulls.
- Mutton or lambGenuine mutton, from an older sheep (usually reckoned over a year or two, definitions vary), is uncommon in supermarkets; leftover roast leg or shoulder of lamb behaves the same way here, though with less depth. Any cold roasted red meat will take the same treatment.
- YieldAround a pound of cooked meat with the cabbage serves three to four as a main course with potatoes.
Cassell's is thick with dishes like this one, built entirely around the remains of a joint. A household that roasted a leg of mutton on Sunday was expected to account for it through the week, and the dictionary format gives the cook a menu of ways to do so: minced, hashed, rissoled, curried, moulded. Red cabbage as a border is a characteristically Victorian touch, chosen as much for the colour against the brown mince and pale fried bread as for the flavour, though the pairing of pork or mutton with cabbage dressed in butter and pepper runs through northern European cooking generally. Sippets, from the same root as "sop", are among the oldest words in the English kitchen, appearing in cookery texts centuries before this one and surviving into the twentieth century mainly as a garnish for exactly this sort of made-over dish.