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Mutton, Minced
Put a lump of butter into a stewpan; when it has melted dredge in flour enough to absorb the butter, and keep it well stirred over a slow fire until of a light brown colour; add half a pound of mutton, minced finely, from a roast leg, and have ready a cupful of good broth made from the bone, with the addition of a bit of well-flavoured ham, and pepper, salt, and nutmeg; mix well, and simmer gently for half an hour, but do not boil. Remove from the fire, and stir in a bit of anchovy butter the size of a walnut. Serve with a garnish of toasted sippets or a border of endive boiled as follows. Pick the yellowish-white leaves from the stalk, and boil them in plenty of salted water, then throw them into cold; drain, press, and chop. Make hot in a clean stewpan with a little good white sauce, season with pepper, salt, and nutmeg, add the yolk of an egg or two, and serve round the mutton.
A Victorian way with Sunday's cold roast leg: a brown roux, a little strong broth, and thirty minutes of heat that never reaches a bubble. The whole dish stands or falls on that last point.
- Never let it boilThe mutton is already cooked; the half-hour simmer is only to warm it through and let the sauce take flavour. A hard boil will tighten the fibres of the cold meat and make it dry and stringy. Hold the pan at a bare tremble, well below a bubble.
- QuantitiesHalf a pound of minced meat to a cupful of broth (read as roughly 8 fl oz) will serve two or three. "A lump of butter" is best read as about 1 oz, with roughly the same weight of flour dredged in to absorb it.
- The brown roux"Light brown colour" over a slow fire means several minutes of steady stirring. Taken further it thickens less and can turn bitter; taken less far it tastes of raw flour.
- Mincing, not grinding"Minced finely" here means small distinct pieces rather than paste. A food processor will reduce cold roast lamb to paste in seconds; pulse it, or chop by hand for the texture the dish expects.
- MuttonTrue mutton — sheep over two years — is sold now only by specialist butchers. Leg of lamb behaves the same way here, though with less of the deep, slightly gamey flavour the recipe assumes.
- Anchovy butterNot sold widely today: mash 2-3 anchovy fillets into an equal volume of soft butter. "The size of a walnut" is about half an ounce. It goes in off the heat because boiling the butter in would split the sauce and coarsen the anchovy.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, toasted or fried in butter, stood around the edge of the dish. They are structural as well as decorative, since the mince is soft and needs something to eat it with.
- The endiveThis is curly endive or the blanched chicory heart, not the loose green salad leaf. Boiling then plunging into cold water sets the colour and stops the cooking; press it hard, because waterlogged chopped greens will thin the white sauce.
- Egg yolks in the endiveStir them in off direct heat and serve at once. Held over a flame they scramble, and the border goes granular.
This is one of the reheated-meat dishes that were a fixed obligation of the Victorian middle-class kitchen, where a large roast joint on Sunday was expected to reappear in disguise for several days. The technique here is French in structure — a brown roux, a broth made from the bone, a finishing butter worked in off the heat — applied to the most English of joints, and it reflects how thoroughly the vocabulary of the professional French kitchen had entered domestic English cookery books by the 1870s and 80s. Anchovy butter and anchovy essence appear constantly in such recipes: they supplied savoury depth to twice-cooked meat without announcing themselves as fish. The endive border shows a vegetable treated as part of the plated composition — dressed, bound with sauce and yolk, and arranged rather than simply set alongside.