Home › Entrees › Mutton with Currant Jelly Sauce
Mutton with Currant Jelly Sauce
2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1/4 teaspoon salt Few grains pepper 1 cup Brown Stock 1/3 cup currant jelly 1 1/2 tablespoons Sherry wine 6 slices cold cooked mutton Brown the butter, add flour, seasonings, and stock, gradually; then add jelly, and when melted, add mutton. When meat is heated, add wine. If mutton gravy is at hand, use instead of making a Brown Sauce.
A reheating dish for leftover roast mutton, built on a browned butter-flour roux and sharpened with currant jelly. The whole thing takes about ten minutes once the stock is measured out.
- Brown the butter, not the flour aloneThe colour and nutty flavour come from cooking the butter until it turns hazelnut brown before the flour goes in. Keep the heat moderate; browned butter slides into burnt in seconds, and burnt roux is bitter.
- Add the stock graduallyPour in a few tablespoons first and work it smooth, then add the rest. Dumping in a full cup of cold stock at once gives lumps that no amount of whisking fully clears.
- Brown StockA beef stock in which the meat is browned before simmering, giving colour and depth. A good unsalted beef stock or a dark lamb stock works; if using a commercial concentrate, cut the added salt back to a pinch since these run salty.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, still sold for exactly this purpose. A third of a cup is quite sweet against one cup of stock, so taste after it melts and add a teaspoon of vinegar or lemon juice if the sauce needs a counterweight.
- MuttonMutton is mature sheep, generally over a year old (definitions vary, and some reserve the term for animals of two years or more), and it is rarely sold in North America now. Cold roast leg of lamb, sliced about a quarter inch thick, is the practical substitute; the sauce is designed to carry a strong, fatty meat.
- Reheat, do not simmerThe meat is already cooked. Slide the slices into the hot sauce, hold it just below a simmer for two or three minutes until heated through, and stop. Longer and the lamb turns grey and stringy.
- Wine lastThe Sherry goes in at the end, after the meat is warm, so the aroma survives. Use a dry or medium Sherry rather than a sweet cream Sherry, which would compound the jelly.
- YieldSix slices with about a cup and a half of sauce serves three, or four alongside potatoes. Mashed potato or plain rice catches the sauce best.
Currant jelly is a long-standing accompaniment to sheep and to venison in English cookery, and like mint sauce it worked as a sharp counterweight to a meat carrying a good deal of fat. Cookbooks of this period gave space to what came to be called "made-over" dishes, meaning Monday's disguise of Sunday's joint, at a time when a full roast was a serious expense and iceboxes made keeping cooked meat a day or two ordinary but not indefinite. The closing line about using mutton gravy if it is at hand is the same instinct: nothing from the roast is thrown away.