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MUTTON, ROAST, WITH GARLIC (a German recipe)
Separate a garlic bulb into the smallest cloves, and envelop each one in a leaf of green sage. Beat the joint-leg or shoulder-take off the skin, and force the garlic well into the middle of the mutton by several holes made for the purpose. Secure the openings, rub the joint with pepper and salt, and roast in the usual way. Long strips of shallot are often used instead of garlic; these are put in with the larding-pin all over the mutton. A few tarragon-leaves or tarragon vinegar, a tea-spoonful of caraway-seeds, a quarter of a pint of beer, and the same quantity of water should be put into the dripping-pan to baste the meat. Time, a quarter of an hour to the pound.
A straightforward stud-and-roast leg, with the unusual touch of each garlic clove being jacketed in sage before it goes into the meat. A few of the terms and the timing need translating.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is sheep over two years old: darker, firmer, strongly flavoured, and now sold mainly by specialist butchers. A leg of hogget or lamb will stand in, but it is milder and cooks faster, so go by internal temperature rather than the clock.
- "Take off the skin"This means the fell, the papery membrane over the fat, not the fat cap itself. Peel it away with a knife tip and leave the fat, which bastes the joint from above while the pan liquor works from below.
- "Beat the joint"An older tenderising step, done with the flat of a cleaver or a rolling pin. On modern lamb it is unnecessary and only bruises the meat; on genuine mutton it does little that resting and slow carving will not.
- Studding the meatMake the holes with a thin boning knife or a steel skewer pushed to the centre along the grain, then post the sage-wrapped clove down with a finger or the skewer's blunt end. The sage leaf keeps the garlic from scorching against the hot meat and turning acrid. A larding-pin, mentioned for the shallot version, is a hollow needle; a paring knife does the same job.
- Oven heat"Roast in the usual way" would in many kitchens of the period have meant the spit before an open fire, though ranges with ovens were also in common use by then. For an oven today, start at 425F for 20 minutes to colour the fat, then drop to 350F for the remainder.
- Quarter of a pintImperial measure, so 5 fl oz, or a generous half cup each of beer and water. Use a mild ale or bitter; a modern heavily hopped IPA will turn the pan juices bitter as they reduce.
- The basting liquidHalf a pint of liquid in a hot pan will be gone well before a large joint is done. Check every 20 minutes and top up with water, or it will scorch and the drippings will be unusable for gravy.
- Fifteen minutes to the poundThat works out at rare to medium-rare on a modern leg. Pull the joint at 130-135F in the thickest part for pink, 145F for medium, and rest it 20 minutes under foil before carving.
- YieldA 5 lb leg serves six to eight. The pan liquor, skimmed and reduced, is the sauce; the caraway and tarragon are there to make it, not the meat.
Cassell's flags this as "a German recipe", and the tell is in the pan rather than the meat: caraway seed and beer in the dripping-pan are central European habits, not English ones. Studding a leg of mutton with garlic is much older and much wider than any one country, being standard practice in French and Italian cookery too, but English kitchens of the period were often wary of garlic, and it frequently appears in cookery books filed under foreign recipes rather than offered plainly. The sage wrapper is the interesting flourish, and reads as a compromise: sage was thoroughly respectable in an English kitchen and its resinous flavour tempers the garlic buried alongside it. Mutton was then a staple roasting meat in Britain, generally cheaper and more common than beef and far more common than lamb, which is one reason a dictionary of cookery could give it so many separate entries.