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Mutton, Shoulder of, with Oysters
Let the shoulder be well hung, then salt it well for two days. Bone it, and sprinkle it with pepper and a little pounded mace. Lay some oysters over it, and roll the meat up tightly, and tie it. Stew in a small quantity of water, with an onion and a few peppercorns, till quite tender. Have ready a good gravy, and some oysters stewed in it; thicken this with flour and butter, and pour it over the mutton when the tape is taken off. (See also OYSTERS WITH LEG OF MUTTON.)
A boned, stuffed and rolled shoulder, braised rather than roasted. The whole thing turns on how briefly the oysters meet the heat.
- The oysters are the hingeOysters inside the roll cook for the whole length of the braise and will end up as seasoning rather than as oysters; their liquor perfumes the meat. The oysters in the sauce are different: the recipe stews them in the gravy, but a minute or two in hot gravy off the boil, just until the edges ruffle, is enough. Anything longer and they shrink to erasers.
- "Well hung"Victorian mutton was hung for a week or more to tenderise and develop flavour. Supermarket lamb or hogget has had a short wet-age at most. Buy from a butcher who dry-ages if you can, and expect a milder result if you cannot.
- Mutton versus lambA true mutton shoulder (sheep over two years) is around 4-5 lb boned and needs the full slow treatment. A lamb shoulder is smaller, about 3 lb boned, and will be tender in appreciably less time.
- The two-day saltingThis is a light dry-cure for flavour and moisture, not a preservation method, and it assumed a cold larder. Rub with salt, set on a rack over a tray and keep it in the refrigerator, turning daily. Rinse and pat dry before boning and rolling.
- "Tie it" and "the tape"Tape here means the butcher's tape or string used to truss the roll. Kitchen twine at 1-inch intervals does the same job. Cut it away before saucing so the joint can be carved in neat rounds.
- Pounded maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg — warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself. Ground mace from a jar is fine; a scant half teaspoon over a shoulder is enough, as it dominates quickly.
- Stewing time and liquid"A small quantity of water" means a braise, not a boil: an inch in a heavy lidded pot, barely trembling. The recipe stews on the hob and gives no time; reckon roughly on 2 1/2 to 3 hours for mutton, closer to 2 for lamb, until a skewer meets no resistance. A covered pot in a low oven is a modern alternative the recipe does not call for.
- The sauce"Thicken with flour and butter" means beurre manie — equal weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste and whisked into the simmering gravy in small pieces. Strain and reduce the braising liquid first and use it as part of the gravy; there is a great deal of flavour in it.
- YieldA boned mutton shoulder of this size serves six to eight, with mashed or boiled potatoes to take the sauce.
Mutton with oysters is an old pairing in British cooking, appearing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books both as a stuffing for a boned shoulder and as forcemeat pushed into slits cut in a leg. The cross-reference to "Oysters with Leg of Mutton" points at exactly that second method. It reads as extravagant now, but oysters were for long stretches of the period cheap enough to be shifted inland by the barrel, and they were used the way anchovies or mushroom ketchup were used: as a source of savoury depth rather than as a luxury in themselves. The book itself carries no attribution on the page, but the dictionary-style title and cross-reference are consistent with a work compiled for middle-class households with a cook, and it includes the dish among the mutton entries as one of the standard ways of dressing a shoulder, a joint that is awkward to carve on the bone and therefore repays boning and rolling. The oyster beds of the Thames estuary and the Essex and Kent coasts declined under overfishing and pollution over the closing decades of the century and on into the early twentieth, the typhoid scares of the 1900s doing much of the damage, and dishes like this one drifted out of the everyday repertoire with them.