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Mutton, Boiled Breast of, and Caper Sauce
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 or 5 persons.-Breast of mutton, breadsavoury crumbs, 2 tablespoonfuls of minced sa herbs (put a large proportion of parsley), pepper and salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 7d. per lb. INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 or 5 persons.—Breast of mutton, breadcrumbs, 2 tablespoonfuls of minced savoury herbs (put a large proportion of parsley), pepper and salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 7d. per lb.
Cut off the superfluous fat; bone the meat; sprinkle over a layer of breadcrumbs, minced herbs and seasoning; roll and bind it up firmly. Boil gently for 2 hours, remove the tape and serve with caper sauce, a little of which should be poured over the meat.
TIME.-2 hours.
SEASONABLE all the year.
Mutton, An excellent way to
A stuffed, rolled breast of mutton, poached rather than roasted — an economical cut treated with the patience it needs. The essentials translate cleanly, though the meat itself now takes some seeking out.
- The cutBreast of mutton is the thin, fatty belly section from the underside of the ribs. Butchers who carry mutton at all will bone it on request; lamb breast is the usual modern substitute and will cook in about 90 minutes rather than two hours.
- Trim harder than you think"Cut off the superfluous fat" is the hinge of the dish. Breast is layered with fat that renders into the poaching water; leaving too much gives a greasy, slack roll. Strip the outer fat cap and the thick seams, keeping only what runs between the muscle.
- BindingThe recipe rolls the meat and later says to remove tape — narrow tape was a common period binding for rolled joints. Butcher's twine at 1-inch intervals does the same job and is easier to cut away cleanly.
- "Boil gently"This means a bare simmer, water barely trembling, not a rolling boil. A hard boil squeezes the muscle fibres and the roll turns stringy. Keep it just covered with water or light stock and skim as it goes.
- The stuffingTwo tablespoons of minced savoury herbs, weighted toward parsley, with breadcrumbs, pepper and salt. Fresh crumbs from stale bread absorb the fat far better than dried packaged crumbs. Thyme and marjoram are plausible additions, though the recipe names only parsley.
- Caper sauceThe period sauce is a white sauce or melted butter sauce loosened with some of the cooking liquor, with capers and a spoonful of their vinegar stirred in at the end. The vinegar is what makes it work against fatty mutton — do not leave it out.
- ServingRest the roll ten minutes before cutting the twine, or it will fall apart on the board. Slice about half an inch thick. Four to five servings as the original states.
- Cost note"7d. per lb" is seven old pence, a price from a period when breast was among the cheapest meat on the block. It is a guide to the cut's standing, not to anything you will pay now.
Boiled stuffed breast with caper sauce belongs to the thrifty end of Victorian and Edwardian meat cookery: a cheap, fatty, awkward cut made presentable by boning, stuffing and rolling it into something that could be sliced at table like a joint. Capers — the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, imported from the Mediterranean — were a long-established English partner to boiled mutton, their sharpness cutting fat in the way that mint sauce was held to do for roast lamb. Mrs Beeton's household books commonly gave an average cost alongside the number a dish would feed, so that a mistress could weigh one against the other. The "seasonable all the year" note reflects mutton's usefulness in an era when much meat was tied to a season; sheep were slaughtered year-round, and mutton, from sheep older than lamb (the dividing line was drawn variously, often at a year or more), was the ordinary meat of British tables until lamb displaced it in the twentieth century.