Home › Cookery › Roast Saddle of Mutton
Roast Saddle of Mutton
Trim the joint carefully, roast it at a brisk, clear fire; baste frequently, and when done dredge it plentifully with salt, and serve with the gravy well freed from fat.
Three lines of instruction assume a cook who already knows how to manage a roast at an open fire. The gaps worth filling are the cut itself, what replaces the "brisk, clear fire," and how long the thing actually needs.
- What a saddle isThe saddle is the whole loin section with both sides left joined at the backbone, cut across the animal rather than down it. Butchers rarely display one; it must be ordered, and a saddle of lamb runs 5 to 7 lb, enough for six to eight people.
- Mutton versus lambMutton means older sheep, usually defined as over two years old (the line between lamb, hogget and mutton varies by country), with darker meat and a much stronger flavor. In the US it is sold mainly through halal and specialty butchers; a saddle of lamb behaves the same way in the oven but cooks a little faster and tastes considerably milder.
- Translating the brisk fireA brisk, clear fire is radiant heat with no smoke. Start at 450F for 15 to 20 minutes to set the surface, then drop to 325F for the rest. Reckon roughly 15 minutes per pound at the lower temperature, but go by thermometer, not clock.
- DonenessPull the saddle at 130 to 135F in the thickest part of the loin for medium-rare and rest it 15 minutes under foil. Nineteenth-century roasting often took mutton well past that; loin is lean and turns dry and gray if pushed to 155F.
- Trimming the jointTrim the flank flaps and any hard external fat down to about a quarter inch, leaving enough to render and self-baste. The kidneys and their suet are sometimes still attached; remove them or tuck them underneath, but they will not roast at the same rate as the loin.
- Basting and the salt dredgeBaste every 15 minutes with the pan fat. The plentiful salt goes on after roasting, not before, as the recipe directs; salting the surface an hour ahead instead gives more even seasoning throughout and is unlikely to hinder browning at 450F.
- Gravy well freed from fatTip the pan drippings into a narrow measuring cup, let them settle two or three minutes, and skim or pour off the clear fat from the top. Deglaze the roasting pan with stock and add the defatted juices back.
- Carving and servingA saddle is carved in long slices parallel to the backbone, or in shorter slices across the loin, then lifted off the bone. Currant jelly or mint sauce was a common accompaniment to mutton at this period.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, drew on contributions credited to some 250 ladies of Virginia and her sister states, and was written for households cooking at hearths or on early ranges and expecting a large joint on the table for company. The saddle was among the prestige mutton roasts of the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic: leaving both loins attached to the backbone means a big, handsome joint that could be carried in whole and carved at table, at the cost of a cut that could otherwise have been divided into chops. Mutton was ordinary American eating well into the nineteenth century, when sheep were kept as much for wool as for meat and animals came to slaughter old; the later shift to lamb is usually attributed to a mix of changes in sheep farming and a growing preference for milder meat, which is why this recipe now reads as a period document rather than a weeknight instruction. The brevity is characteristic of the book: contributors assumed their reader knew fire management and needed only the particulars, the salt dredge and the defatted gravy.