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Mutton, Spiced
Cut a pound and a half of lean meat into pieces about the size of a walnut, sprinkle them with a mixture of curry-powder, ground allspice and coriander, powdered ginger and cloves-a good tea-spoonful in all. Then dredge each piece with pepper. Melt some dripping, fry the meat to a delicate brown with some onion cut into dice; then pour the fat off, add half a pint of brown stock, put in four ounces of shredded celery, boil up and skim. Cook until the meat is very tender. Half an hour before serving, add a heaped table-spoonful of sultana raisins, and salt and chutney to taste; also an ounce of riceflour blended with stock. When finished, the whole should be thick, the sauce just coating the meat. Serve with any approved vegetable.
A gently spiced mutton stew in the Anglo-Indian mode, thickened at the end rather than floured at the start. The quantities are British imperial and the method assumes a slow top-of-stove braise.
- Half a pint of stockCassell's is British, so the imperial pint applies: half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. It looks scant for 1½ lb of meat, and it is meant to — the liquid should barely cover, then reduce to a coating sauce.
- The spice mixtureA single teaspoonful of curry powder, allspice, coriander, ginger and cloves combined is very restrained by current taste. Clove and ginger dominate if left to themselves, so weight the blend toward the curry powder and coriander and use the clove sparingly.
- DrippingBeef or mutton dripping, the standard frying fat of the period. Any neutral oil, ghee or clarified butter does the same job; ghee suits the spicing best.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is older sheep, generally reckoned over two years — stronger in flavour and slow to tenderise. It is sold by some butchers and halal shops but rarely in supermarkets. Lamb shoulder or leg works, cut the same walnut size, but will be tender in about half the time.
- Cooking timeThe recipe gives none. Reckon 1½ to 2 hours at a bare simmer for mutton shoulder, 45 minutes to an hour for lamb, with the pan barely bubbling. Boiling hard will tighten the meat before the connective tissue breaks down.
- Pouring off the fatThis is the hinge. The sauce is reduced to a glaze at the end, so any fat left in the pan concentrates with it and the dish turns greasy. Tip it all out after browning.
- Rice flourStill sold as rice flour, and worth using rather than substituting wheat. Blend it smooth with cold stock before adding, and give it a few minutes' simmer to lose any chalkiness.
- ChutneyProbably a sweet fruit chutney of the mango type; a tablespoon is about right, added with the sultanas as the recipe directs so its sugar does not catch. Salt only after it goes in, since chutney and stock both carry salt.
- Yield1½ lb of lean meat serves three, or four with rice. The "approved vegetable" of the period would have been plain boiled potatoes or greens; rice is the more natural partner to the spicing.
Spiced or curried mutton in this style belongs to the long domestication of Indian cookery in British kitchens, a process well advanced by the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled in the mid-to-late 1870s. Commercial curry powder — a British blend rather than an Indian one — had been sold in London since the eighteenth century, and by then it sat on ordinary household shelves alongside allspice and cloves. What marks this recipe as a domestic rather than an imitative one is how the Indian element is folded into English braising practice: dripping, brown stock, shredded celery and a rice-flour liaison, with the sultanas and chutney supplying the sweet-sour note that Victorian cooks associated with the East. Mutton itself was the everyday meat of British households of the period, cheaper and more plentiful than beef, and its assertive flavour took spicing well — one reason so many books of the era pair the two.