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Sheep's Tails, with Rice
Put three or four sheep's tails into boiling water, and let them boil for a quarter of an hour. Take them up, and lay them side by side in a stewpan, with slices of bacon under and over them. Put with them a sliced onion, a scraped carrot, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, two cloves, and a dozen pepercorns; pour upon them as much stock as will barely cover them. Put the lid on the saucepan, and stew the tails very gently until done enough. Boil separately in nicely-flavoured stock a quarter of a pound of well-washed rice. Put half of this at the bottom of a dish, lay the tails upon it, and cover them with the other half. Strain the gravy, thicken with brown thickening, add a little salt if required, and send it to table in a tureen. Time to simmer the tails, four hours.
A plain braise of a cut that has largely left British butchery, held together by two things: patient low heat and ruthless skimming of fat. Everything else is standard nineteenth-century stewpan technique.
- The fat is the whole problemSheep's tails render a great deal of fat, and the finished gravy will be a slick unless it is dealt with. Chill the strained cooking liquid until the fat sets and lift it off in a cake before thickening, or blot it repeatedly with paper while hot.
- Sourcing the tailsLamb or mutton tails can be found at halal and some Caribbean butchers, often frozen. Tails from British and North American lambs are generally docked short, whereas older recipes may have had the longer, fattier tails of fat-tailed breeds in mind; three or four modern tails are unlikely to feed more than two. Oxtail behaves similarly in a braise if tails cannot be found.
- The preliminary boilThe quarter-hour in boiling water is a blanch to firm the tails and drive off scum and surface fat. Drain and rinse them before they go into the stewpan, or the grey scum ends up in your gravy.
- "Until done enough" and four hoursThe stated four hours suits a bare shiver of a simmer on a coal range. On a modern hob, keep the liquid at 180-190F with no more than an occasional bubble; two and a half to three hours usually brings tails to the point where the meat gives at the bone. A 300F oven with the lid on is steadier than a burner.
- Brown thickeningVictorian shorthand for a brown roux, flour cooked in butter or dripping until nut-coloured, kept ready in a jar. Make it fresh: a tablespoon each of butter and flour cooked to the colour of a hazelnut will thicken about a pint of strained stock.
- The riceA quarter pound is about 2/3 cup dry, yielding roughly two cups cooked. Boiled in stock it should be tender but separate, since it is being used as a bed and a lid rather than a risotto; long-grain suits the purpose better than pudding rice.
- The baconSlices under and over are barding, to keep the tails from catching and to add cure flavour. Use unsmoked streaky if you want the mild original effect; smoked bacon will dominate the thyme and bay.
- ServingThe tureen of gravy is not optional here, as the rice is dry on its own. Count on two tails per person and serve something sharp alongside, capers or a mustard pickle, against the richness.
Cassell's, in what is often said to be the common assumption of late-Victorian household dictionaries, worked on the principle that nothing off a carcass should be wasted, and its pages give equal shelf-room to saddle of mutton and to tails, ears, trotters and heads. Sheep's tails were a genuine butcher's item in Britain when lambs were docked and the tails sold cheap in season, and the same cut has a much longer standing in Middle Eastern, Central Asian and North African cooking, where fat-tailed breeds are raised partly for the tail fat itself. The treatment here, blanch, bard with bacon, bury in aromatics, simmer for hours and serve with a strained thickened gravy, is straight French braising method as taught to English kitchens through the century, applied to an offcut a French chef would have recognised as queues de mouton. The bed of stock-boiled rice is the period's usual answer to how a small quantity of gelatinous meat can be made to fill a dish.