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MUTTON, SADDLE OF (a la Portugaise)
Prepare a marinade as follows. Boil together, in two quarts of port wine mixed with a pint of vinegar, a couple of onions each stuck with six cloves, six bay-leaves, two large carrots, half a dozen small turnips, a bunch of parsley, and a clove of garlic or three shallots. Put the mutton into a rather deep dish, first neatly trimming the top and flaps, and removing with the skin any excess of fat; pour the boiling marinade over it, and keep it basted often until cold; then turn the meat in it once a day, and, in five or six days, drain, wipe dry, and roast for a quarter of an hour over the usual time for mutton, covering it with a buttered paper, and basting constantly until done. Serve with a gravy from the meat to which a little of the marinade has been strained and a good quantity of currant jelly been added. Time for ten pounds, two hours and three-quarters. Probable cost, 10d. per pound. Sufficient for seven or eight persons.
A Victorian marinated roast that treats mutton like venison. The technique is sound; the timings and the larder assumptions need updating.
- The hinge: marinate coldThe original assumes a cool larder over five or six days; it gives no temperature. Do this in the refrigerator, in a non-reactive dish (glass, glazed earthenware or stainless) or a heavy zip bag, turning daily. Port and vinegar are acidic enough to strip a cheap aluminium roasting tin.
- Mutton is not lambMutton means a sheep over two years old, darker and stronger-flavoured, and it is a special-order item from a good butcher. A saddle of lamb of the same weight will be tender in far less time and needs no more than two days in the marinade.
- Saddle, and its sizeA saddle is the whole unsplit loin, both sides on the bone, from the last rib to the hip. Ten pounds is a large one; a saddle of 5-7 lb is more usual from a butcher today, and will want proportionately less time than the stated two and three-quarter hours.
- No oven temperature is givenVictorian roasting was done at the fire or in a closed range, neither of which the recipe specifies. For an oven, start at 450F for 20 minutes to colour the fat, then drop to 325F. Judge by a thermometer in the thickest part of the loin, clear of bone, rather than by the clock.
- Two hours forty-five is too longAbout sixteen and a half minutes to the pound, aimed at meat cooked through and grey. Mutton and lamb loin are at their best at 130-135F for medium rare, 145F for medium, which on a modern joint means well under two hours. Rest it 20 minutes before carving.
- Buttered paperA sheet of buttered greaseproof or parchment laid over the joint, not wrapped round it. It shields the surface while the fat renders; take it off for the last 20 minutes to brown. Foil works but steams more.
- Boil the marinade before it goes in the gravyThe strained marinade has been in contact with raw meat for the better part of a week. Bring the measured spoonfuls to a hard boil in the pan juices and reduce before the jelly goes in.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, sweet with a sharp edge. The recipe asks for "a good quantity"; start with two tablespoons in the finished gravy and taste, as port and jelly together turn cloying quickly.
- CostTenpence per pound is pre-decimal British currency, twelve pence to the shilling.
This is mutton dressed as venison, a stock manoeuvre of the nineteenth-century English kitchen. Port, cloves, bay, a long steep in a boiled wine-and-vinegar marinade and a finish with currant jelly are all the standard furniture of a venison haunch, applied here to a joint that could be bought at any butcher's; the marinade darkens the meat, softens the older animal's fibre and pushes its flavour towards game. The label a la Portugaise in Cassell's is loose, as such tags usually were, and need not indicate any Portuguese practice. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for the large late-Victorian household, gives cost per pound and number of persons for almost every entry, and a five-day marinade and a three-hour roast could be printed without apology.