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Iced Saddle of Mutton
Reserve the dripping from the meat when it is roasting. After the saddle is nicely cooked, let it get cold. Then take the white part of the gravy and melt it to the consistency of cream. Pour this over the saddle until it is covered with a white coat; if it appears rough, warm an iron spoon and pass over it until it is smooth. Place it on a dish, and dress the dish all round with vegetable flowers and curled parsley, using the parsley to ornament the saddle also.--Mrs. Judge S.
This is a finishing technique rather than a full recipe: a cold roast saddle is masked in its own clarified dripping so it looks glazed white, in the manner of a chaud-froid. The original assumes you already know how to roast the joint.
- What a saddle isThe saddle is the unsplit loin from both sides of the backbone, with the chops still attached; a lamb saddle runs around 5 to 7 lb and a mutton one heavier. A butcher may be able to cut one to order, though you will more often be offered a rolled double loin; a bone-in rack or a boned, tied loin takes the coating just as well.
- Mutton versus lambMutton means sheep over about two years old, with darker meat and a much stronger fat. It is sold in the US mainly through halal and specialty butchers. Lamb is the practical substitute and its fat is milder, which suits this dish.
- Roasting itSear at 450F for 15 minutes, then drop to 325F and roast to an internal 135-140F for pink, roughly 12-15 minutes per pound, going by the thermometer rather than the clock. Mutton is often taken a little further than lamb, but a loin cooked much past 155F will be dry.
- "The white part of the gravy"This is the fat that rises and solidifies on top of the chilled pan drippings, not the meat juices below it. Pour the drippings into a bowl, refrigerate until firm, lift the white cap off cleanly and scrape any dark jelly from its underside, or the coating will streak.
- "Melt to the consistency of cream"Warm the fat only until it is barely pourable and slightly cloudy, just at the point of melting. Fully liquid fat runs off the cold meat and pools on the dish; fat that has begun to set will not level. Two or three thin coats, chilling between each, give a better finish than one thick one.
- The hot spoonThe recipe offers the warmed spoon as a remedy if the surface looks rough, and the trick still works. Heat the bowl of a metal spoon in hot water, dry it, and glide it flat over any ridges. Too hot and it melts through to the meat.
- Vegetable flowersNineteenth-century garnishing typically meant carrot and turnip cut into rosettes, radishes fanned, and parsley plunged briefly into ice water to curl. Anything wet must be dried before it touches the fat coating, which will not adhere to moisture.
- Serving and keepingServe cold, carved in long thin slices parallel to the bone, with pickles or a sharp jelly to cut the fat. A 6 lb saddle feeds eight to ten. Keep it refrigerated until it goes to the table and return leftovers to the cold promptly rather than leaving the joint out through a long meal.
Coating cold cooked meat in a pale, opaque sauce and calling it "iced" is a domestic cousin of the French chaud-froid, which used a jellied white sauce; here the same white gloss comes from clarified dripping. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions credited by initial in the fashion of the day, is full of these cold buffet pieces, which let the cook do the work a day ahead. Saddle of mutton was a prestige joint in Anglo-American dining well into the nineteenth century; mature mutton has since largely disappeared from American butchers' counters as sheep raising shifted toward lamb sold young, which is why the dish now reads as more foreign than it did to the book's first readers.