Boiled Mutton
Trim off the outside fat from a fore quarter or loin. Place in kettle; cover with boiling water and cook until tender, allowing fifteen minutes to the pound. Serve with caper sauce made from the water in which mutton was boiled. Reserve the remainder of the water for soup for next day.
A plain nineteenth-century boiled joint, written for cooks who knew what to do without being told. Two things need filling in: the meat itself, which is hard to buy now, and the fact that "boiled" here never meant a rolling boil.
- Never actually boil itBring the water to the boil, put in the meat, then drop the heat so the surface barely trembles at around 180-190F. A true boil tightens the muscle fibers and shreds the outside of the joint while the center is still tough.
- Finding muttonMutton means sheep over a year old, with darker meat and a stronger flavor; it is sold now mainly by halal butchers and farm suppliers. A bone-in lamb shoulder or leg is the usual substitute and will be milder and considerably more tender.
- "Fore quarter or loin"The forequarter is the shoulder end, including neck and shanks, and is the better choice for a long moist cook. Loin is leaner and dries out; if you use it, check for doneness early rather than trusting the clock.
- Fifteen minutes to the poundThat timing is on the short side for older mutton, which may want half again as long or more before a fork goes in easily. Lamb shoulder will land nearer the original figure. Judge by tenderness at the bone, not by the arithmetic.
- Season the waterThe recipe says nothing about flavoring the water. Salt it generously and add an onion, a carrot, a few peppercorns and a bay leaf; otherwise both the meat and the resulting broth will be flat.
- Caper sauce from the liquorMake a roux of 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour, whisk in about 1 1/2 cups of the strained cooking liquid, simmer until it coats a spoon, then stir in 2-3 tablespoons drained capers and a squeeze of lemon off the heat. Skim the fat from the liquor first or the sauce will break greasy.
- The reserved waterStrain it, cool it quickly in a shallow pan, and refrigerate rather than leaving it out overnight as a 1907 cellar allowed. The fat sets on top and lifts off clean the next day, leaving a good base for barley or vegetable soup.
- YieldA 4-5 lb bone-in shoulder serves six to eight, with a quart or more of broth left over.
Boiled mutton with caper sauce was one of the fixed points of English and Anglo-American cooking for most of the nineteenth century, and it appears here as a matter of course rather than as anything novel. The dish is thrifty by design: the joint feeds the household, the cooking liquor becomes the sauce, and what remains is tomorrow's soup, a sequence that shows up again and again in period cookbooks. Capers, pickled flower buds shipped from the Mediterranean, supplied the sharp note that fatty mutton needs, and the pairing was so standard that recipes often say only "caper sauce" with no further explanation. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other cookbooks published by food companies of the era it surrounded its chocolate recipes with a full course of general household cookery to earn its place on the kitchen shelf. That mutton has largely disappeared from American butcher counters since is usually attributed to twentieth-century taste and to the decline of the wool trade, though the explanation is more often repeated than demonstrated; it is not a verdict on the dish's merits.