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To Boil a Leg of Mutton
Make a paste of flour quite plain, mixed stiff with water, roll out as for a meat pudding; break and turn in the shank bone; then cover the leg of mutton carefully with the paste; tie up tight in a well-floured cloth. Have ready sufficient boiling water, place in the joint, allow ten minutes for checking the boiling, and twenty minutes for each pound of meat. Carefully remove the paste, which can be done by one cut longitudinally and one cut across. Strain the gravy and serve as usual.
This is a boiled joint sealed in a flour paste and a cloth, so that it poaches in its own juices rather than leaching them into the water. The crust is a wrapper, not food.
- The hinge: keep the water at a bare simmerThe hinge: how hard you boil — The recipe puts the joint into boiling water and allows ten minutes for the boil to be checked by the cold meat. A hard rolling boil risks working the paste loose, so once the pot has recovered its heat it is safer to hold the water at a bare simmer, where the surface barely shivers.
- The paste is not eatenPlain flour and water, stiff enough to roll like a suet pudding crust, is a disposable jacket. The recipe gives no thickness beyond 'as for a meat pudding': roll it thick enough to hold together, seal every seam, and discard it after the two cuts described. Nothing in it is seasoned or intended for the table.
- "Break and turn in the shank bone"The narrow end of the leg is snapped and folded back against the joint so the whole thing makes a compact parcel that the paste can cover without a projecting bone tearing it. A butcher will do this in a moment; it is awkward work at home.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is sheep over about two years old, with darker, stronger meat and more connective tissue. It is sold now mainly by halal and specialist butchers; hogget or a full leg of lamb is the usual substitute, and lamb will reach doneness noticeably sooner than the book's timing allows.
- The timingTen minutes to bring the pot back to the boil plus twenty minutes per pound suits old mutton, which wants long gentle cooking. For modern lamb that is far too long. Cook to internal temperature rather than the clock: 145–150F at the thickest part for pink, higher if you want it falling apart.
- The clothA clean, well-floured cotton or linen cloth, tied tight at both ends with kitchen string, keeps the paste in place. Leave a long tail of string so the joint can be lifted out without being pierced.
- "Strain the gravy"Very little escapes a properly sealed joint, so the strained liquid means whatever has collected inside the crust plus the pot liquor, which will be thin and unsalted. Reduce it, season it, or serve the leg in the period manner with caper sauce or onion sauce.
- YieldA whole leg runs 6 to 8 lb and serves eight to ten, with enough left cold for a second meal. You need a pot deep enough to submerge the parcel completely.
Boiling a joint inside a flour crust and a cloth belongs to a long English tradition of cooking meat without an oven, on an open hearth where a large pot of water was the most reliable steady heat available. The paste does the work a modern sealed roasting bag or sous-vide pouch does: it keeps the juices and the flavour inside the meat instead of surrendering them to the water. Boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce was a staple of nineteenth-century Anglo-American dining, plain enough for a family dinner and respectable enough for company, and its appearance in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877) reflects how much of that book was assembled from English domestic practice as it had been carried into Virginia kitchens and passed between households as contributed receipts. Mutton itself was then ordinary meat; American taste shifted decisively toward young lamb over the following century, which is why the joint the recipe assumes is now the harder one to buy.