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Mutton Broth
3 lbs. mutton (from the neck) 2 quarts cold water 1 teaspoon salt Few grains pepper 3 tablespoons rice or 3 tablespoons barley Wipe meat, remove skin and fat, and cut in small pieces. Put into kettle with bones, and cover with cold water. Heat gradually to boiling-point, skim, then season with salt and pepper. Cook slowly until meat is tender, strain, and remove fat. Reheat to boiling-point, add rice or barley, and cook until rice or barley is tender. If barley is used, soak over night in cold water. Some of the meat may be served with the broth.
A plain long-simmered broth of the sort that once did duty as both invalid food and family supper. Nothing here has become unsafe, but a few of the assumptions behind it have changed.
- The cutNeck of mutton — meat from a sheep over a year old — is rarely sold in American supermarkets. Lamb neck or shoulder chops work, though the broth will be milder and sweeter; ask a halal or Middle Eastern butcher if you want the fuller mutton flavour the recipe assumes.
- Cold water, and whyStarting in cold water and heating gradually is the whole method. It draws soluble protein and gelatin out of the meat and bone slowly and brings the scum to the surface where it can be lifted off. Meat dropped straight into hot water sets its surface proteins at once and is generally held to give a less flavourful broth.
- Skim before seasoningSkim the grey foam as it rises, before the liquid reaches a full boil, then salt. That is the order the recipe itself gives.
- Keep it below a boil"Cook slowly" means a bare shiver at the surface, around 185F. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat into the liquid and the broth will never clear, no matter how long you skim.
- TimingThe recipe gives none. Allow two to three hours for lamb neck, three or more for true mutton, until the meat pulls easily from the bone.
- DegreasingRemoving the fat is far easier if you chill the strained broth and lift the solid cap off. If you need it the same hour, blot the surface with strips of paper towel.
- Rice or barleyRice needs about 20 minutes in the reheated broth; pearl barley 40 to 50 minutes from dry, and less after the overnight soak the recipe calls for. Both will keep swelling and thickening on standing, so cook them separately if you plan to hold the broth.
- YieldTwo quarts of water and three pounds of meat gives something under two quarts of broth after the long simmer — four to six servings — plus enough picked meat to return to the pot for a light main course.
Mutton broth belongs to the sickroom as much as the kitchen. Through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth it was a standard restorative for convalescents on both sides of the Atlantic — thin, salted, degreased, thickened with a little rice or barley, and often among the first solid nourishment given after a fever. Its appearance in a general cookbook alongside roasts and chops reflects a period when household manuals were expected to cover nursing as well as dinner. Barley is the older element: barley in broth is a long-standing British kitchen habit, older than the potato, and it has outlasted mutton itself, which fell out of American favour in the twentieth century as sheep were bred and slaughtered younger and "lamb" came to mean nearly all the sheep meat sold.