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Shoulder of Mutton Corned
Take a small shoulder of mutton, rub it with 2 ounces salt. 2 ounces sugar. 1/2 ounce saltpetre.
After twenty-four hours, rub it again with the pickle; next day boil this in paste like the leg of mutton. Serve smothered in onion sauce.
This is a short dry cure built on saltpetre, and the quantity given is far outside anything permitted or advisable in a modern kitchen. The notes below explain the terms and the specific problems.
- The saltpetre is the reason to stopHalf an ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) is roughly 14 grams. Rubbed onto a small shoulder — say four to five pounds — that is on the order of several thousand parts per million of nitrate against the weight of the meat, several times the level permitted in commercial curing today, where nitrate and nitrite are dosed by weight against the weight of the meat and diluted in a measured carrier. There is no way to know from this recipe how much of the rub actually penetrates, which is precisely the problem.
- No temperature is given for the curingThe meat sits for two days being rubbed with its own drawn brine. A nineteenth-century Virginia larder in cool weather is not a 38F refrigerator, and the recipe assumes a season and a room it never names. Any cure without a stated holding temperature is unreproducible.
- "Rub it again with the pickle"The pickle here is not vinegar. It is most likely the liquid the salt and sugar have drawn out of the meat, which pools in the dish; the cook works it back over the surface. In period usage pickle generally means a salt brine.
- "Boil this in paste"A flour-and-water crust was wrapped around the joint before boiling, sealing in juices and salt; such protective crusts were known as huff paste. The paste was a wrapper, not food, and was broken off and discarded. The instruction refers back to a leg of mutton recipe elsewhere in the book.
- Onion sauceThe intended accompaniment is a white sauce, milk-thickened, heavy with boiled and chopped onions — the standard English partner to boiled mutton, meant to cut the salt. It survives in modern cookery and can be made on its own.
- If you want corned muttonUse a current curing recipe that specifies a commercial cure mix, a percentage against the weight of the meat, and a refrigerated holding temperature. Do not scale this one down and hope.
Corned has nothing to do with maize: the corns are the coarse grains of salt rubbed into the meat, a usage attested from roughly the early seventeenth century. Saltpetre earned its place in such cures because it fixes the pigment in the muscle, giving corned and salted meats their pink colour instead of the grey of plain salt — cooks understood the effect long before anyone understood nitrate chemistry, and household books prescribed it by the ounce. Mutton, rather than beef, is the giveaway of period and place: Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, still leans heavily on English joints and English methods, and boiling a joint in a flour paste is a technique straight out of eighteenth-century British cookery. By the time the book appeared, mutton is generally said to have been losing ground in American favour to young lamb, which is one reason recipes like this one read as archaic even to later generations of the same families.