Boiled Mutton
Have the butcher bone a shoulder of mutton or 3 pounds or more of the breast. Wipe the meat with a damp cloth, roll it tightly and tie down with twine or a strip of muslin. Put the bones in the pot with 1/2 teaspoonful of salt and sufficient water to cover the meat and heat to the boiling point. Weigh the meat. Allow fifteen minutes for it to heat through and fifteen minutes for each pound. Put the meat in the pot, draw over the hottest part of the fire that it may boil as quickly as possible; draw back gradually until the water bubbles on but one side of the kettle.
Keep closely covered. When done take out 1 pint of the liquid, thicken it slightly with flour smoothly mixed with a little cold water, season to taste and boil five minutes. A tablespoonful of fine barley, rice or other cereal, a small onion, a carrot or a bit of celery may also be added to the water to give flavor.
Roast Mutton, Breton Style The Breton way of serving roast mutton is to push a clove of garlic into the knuckle end of the leg and to serve with it a garnish of red beans. The beans are soaked and slowly boiled until tender then drained and turned into the pan with the meat an hour before the latter is done. Or after draining, the beans are lightly fried in a little dripping and chopped onion and heaped round the meat as it is ready for serving.
Two related dishes on one page: a rolled shoulder or breast simmered in its own broth, and a French treatment of roast leg with beans. Both assume mutton, which is the part that needs the most translation.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is sheep over about two years old, with darker meat, firmer connective tissue and a stronger flavour. Halal, Caribbean and farm butchers still sell it; otherwise use lamb shoulder or breast, which will be milder and will cook faster.
- It should never actually boilIt should not be held at a rolling boil -- the recipe brings the pot to boiling point and boils the meat quickly at first, then has you draw it back until the water bubbles on one side only, which is a bare simmer, roughly 180-190F. A hard boil tightens the muscle fibres and clouds the broth.
- The timing is a minimum, not a ruleFifteen minutes per pound plus fifteen suits a tender cut, but rolled shoulder and breast are full of collagen and want to go past that. Cook until a skewer slides in with no resistance, generally two to two and a half hours for a 3 lb roll, longer for true mutton.
- Tying the rollKitchen twine at 1-inch intervals is enough; the muslin strip is optional and mostly keeps the outer fat layer in place. Bone the meat yourself if you like, but keep the bones for the pot, as the recipe directs, since they carry most of the gelatin.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon for a potful of water is seasoning for the meat, not for the broth. Taste and correct the liquid before you thicken it, and remember the reserved pint will concentrate as it reduces.
- The sauceA pint of liquid slackened with flour paste makes a thin flour-thickened gravy rather than a true veloute, which is built on a roux. For the slight thickening the recipe asks, about 1 tablespoon of flour mixed smooth with an equal amount of cold water is enough; give it the full five minutes so the flour loses its raw taste. Skim the fat off the surface first.
- AromaticsThe recipe offers a tablespoon of barley, rice or other cereal, plus onion, carrot or celery, added to the water to give flavour. It does not say when, but they can go in with the bones at the start.
- Breton style, oven and beansThe book gives no oven temperature or timing for the roast. By modern practice, a leg at 325-350F, roughly 20 minutes per pound plus 20, or a thermometer reading of about 135F for medium-rare lamb, higher for mutton. The red beans are dried beans, soaked (the recipe does not say for how long) and simmered separately until tender before they meet the roasting pan.
- YieldA boned 3 lb shoulder or breast, rolled, serves four to six with the broth and sauce, more if you serve it with potatoes or the barley cooked in the pot.
Boiled mutton was one of the fixed points of the nineteenth-century English and American table, usually a leg, usually served with caper sauce, and usually chosen because simmering makes something of a cut that roasting would only toughen. This book takes the thriftier route still: shoulder and breast rather than leg, boned and rolled so a cheap, awkward piece carves like a joint, with the bones going into the same pot so nothing is wasted and the cooking liquid becomes the sauce. The Breton note gestures at a loose regional affinity, since the salt-marsh sheep of the Mont-Saint-Michel bay, on the Breton-Norman border, and the dried white and red beans of northwestern France belong to much the same table; garlic pushed into the knuckle is a French habit. The word haricot in old English cookbooks for a mutton stew is often traced to the French verb harigoter, to cut up, rather than to the bean itself, though that connection is traditional rather than settled.