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Braised Fillet of Mutton
Cut the fillet from a leg of mutton by taking off a few inches from the loin end, and a good knuckle, which will do for boiling, from the other end. Take out the bone, and fill the hollow with force-meat, if liked, or put the fillet, well sprinkled with pepper and salt, into a braising-pan as it is, but first lay over the bottom slices of bacon, and on these a couple of carrots and 2 large onions, each stuck with 4 cloves, a small bunch of parsley and thyme, a few peppercorns, and half a pint of gravy or stock. Put more bacon on the top, cover the lid, and braise for three or four hours. Strain the gravy, and flavor it to taste; reduce it by rapid boiling. Have ready some French beans boiled and drained; put the beans into a stewpan with the gravy, and when hot serve them and the meat, which should be glazed, on the same dish. The chump end of a loin may be roasted, then glazed, and served with beans in precisely the same way. The meat should be roasted slowly without getting any brown color. Time, about two hours to roast the chump.
A classic braise of boned leg of mutton, cooked slowly on a bed of bacon and aromatics until the meat is tender enough to carve in thick slices. The old vocabulary of butchery is the main obstacle.
- What the "fillet" isHere it means the thick central portion of a leg once the loin end and the knuckle have been cut away, then boned out. Ask a butcher for a boned, tied leg of lamb or mutton; a 3-4 lb boned joint suits the method and serves six to eight.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is sheep over about two years old, stronger in flavour and far less tender, which is why three or four hours is specified. A modern leg of lamb will be done in roughly half that; check it rather than trusting the clock.
- Half a pint of stockTen fluid ounces in the British measure of the period, so about 1 1/4 cups. It is deliberately shallow — this is a braise, not a stew, and the meat should sit largely above the liquid so the bacon and lid do the rest.
- The braising-panA heavy Dutch oven with a close-fitting lid does the same job. Traditional braising pans were made so coals could sit on the lid as well as beneath, though a range or oven would often have served by this date; the recipe gives no temperature, but a steady low oven of roughly 300-325F is a reasonable equivalent.
- Bacon top and bottomBacon of the period was generally fatter than most modern bacon, and was often cured without smoke. Use unsmoked streaky bacon or thin sheets of pork fatback, or the smoke may dominate the finished gravy.
- GlazingTo glaze, reduce a strained, well-flavoured braising liquid until syrupy and brush it over the meat in several coats, returning the joint briefly to a hot oven between coats. Note that the recipe's reduced gravy is used to dress the beans, so some will need to be kept back for the glaze.
- French beansGreen beans. Boil them until just tender and drain well; they go into the reduced gravy only to heat through, since a second long cooking turns them olive-drab.
- The chump-end variationThe chump is the rump end of the loin. "Roasted slowly without getting any brown color" means a low oven \so so the glaze rather than the roasting supplies the colour; the recipe itself specifies no temperature, only about two hours.
Braising of this kind sits between roasting and stewing, and both the technique and the word came into English cookery from French practice, where the braisi e</re> was a lidded pan built to hold coals on top as well as beneath. Mutton was among the everyday roasting and boiling meats of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and a whole leg could be divided much as it is here: the loin end cut off, the knuckle set aside for the stockpot or a boiled dinner, and the best middle portion boned and stuffed for the table. The pairing with French beans and a glaze suggests the period's ambition toward restaurant presentation — meat and vegetable on one dish, the joint lacquered with its own reduced liquor — in a book aimed at households cooking without a professional kitchen behind them.