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Removes or Releves: Soubise-larded
Carré de mouton à la Soubise-larded, braised, and served with Soubise sauce. au chevreuil-larded, soaked in marinade and braised; served with Chevreuil sauce and potatoes cut in little balls. If stewed prunes are substituted for the potatoes, it may be called à l'Allemande. à l'Algérienne-larded, soaked in marinade and roasted; served in brown sauce with some of the marinade and French plums.
Carrés de mouton à la légumière are two necks roasted, put together like a saddle, and the space between filled up with mashed potato, garnished with other vegetables.
Four lines on a neck of mutton, and the last of them is the most interesting thing in the chapter: two necks roasted and put together to look like a saddle.
- A joint that does not existCarrés de mouton à la légumière is two necks set back to back with mashed potato filling the hollow between them, so that a cheap cut arrives at the table in the outline of an expensive one. The book sets the illusion down without a word of apology.
- Carré is the rackCarré de mouton is the neck end of the loin with the ribs attached, what a butcher now sells as a rack or best end. Two of them tied facing each other is also how a crown roast and a guard of honour are built, so the trick long outlived the book.
- Dried fruit with roast muttonTwo of these four entries finish with stewed prunes or French plums. It reads as odd now, and the page prints it without explanation, which means it needed none. The sugar and acid are doing the same job against the fat that the peppery Poivrade does in the other two.
- Marinade did two jobsBoth the chevreuil and the Algérienne soak the larded neck in marinade before cooking. A marinade of oil, vinegar and aromatics was pushing the flavour towards game, and in a larder with no refrigeration it was also buying the cook a few more days.
- Potatoes cut in ballsPotatoes scooped into little balls appear here as a garnish. The tool is a scoop and the point is uniformity: every potato on the dish the same size, cooking at the same rate, and nothing arriving that looks like a kitchen potato.
- Chevreuil sauceSauce Chevreuil is the venison sauce, a peppery brown sauce with wine and vinegar reduced hard. Where it appears on a mutton page, the sauce is the thing carrying the pretence, not the meat.
This is one sentence of social history disguised as four recipes. A neck of mutton was what a household bought when it was counting, and every entry on the page works at making it not look like one. It is larded so it reads as a dressed joint. It is marinaded so it tastes of game. It is sauced under a German or an Algerian name. And in the last line it is physically rebuilt, two cheap pieces propped together with potato, into the silhouette of the joint that would have cost several times as much. None of that effort was for the family, who knew what the butcher had sent. It was for the people at the table who could only see what arrived, and managing exactly that gap — between what a household could afford and what its dinner appeared to be — is the reason this book existed and sold.