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Mutton, Roast Loin of
INGREDIENTS. Loin of mutton, a little salt.
AVERAGE COST, 10d. per lb.
Cut and trim off the superfluous fat, and see that the butcher joints the meat properly, as thereby much annoyance is saved to the carver, when it comes to table. Have ready a nice clear fire (it LOIN OF MUTTON. need not be a very wide large one), put down the meat, dredge with flour, and baste well until it is done. Make the gravy as for roast leg of mutton, and serve very hot.
TIME. A loin of mutton weighing 6 lbs., 1½ hour or rather longer.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Mutton, Rolled Loin of. (Very Excellent.) INGREDIENTS for dish for 8 persons.- About 6 lbs. of a loin of mutton, 1/2 teaspoonful of pepper, 1/4 teaspoonful of pounded allspice, 1/4 teaspoonful of mace, 1/4 teaspoonful of nutmeg, 6 cloves, forcemeat, 1 glass of port wine, 2 tablespoonfuls of mushroom ketchup. AVERAGE COST, 5s. Hang the mutton till tender, bone it and sprinkle over it pepper, mace, cloves, all.
MUTTON, NECK OF. spice and nutmeg in the above proportion, all of which must be pounded very fine.
Let it remain for a day, then make a forcemeat, cover the meat with it and roll and bind it up firmly. Half bake it in a slow oven, let it grow cold, take off the fat and put the gravy into a stewpan; flour the meat, put it in the gravy and stew it till perfectly tender. Now take out the meat, unbind it, add to the gravy, wine and ketchup as above, give one boil and pour over the meat. Serve with red-currant jelly; and, if obtainable, a few mushrooms stewed for a few minutes in the gravy will be found a great improvement.
TIME.-1½ hour to bake the meat, 1½ hour to stew gently.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Note. This joint will be found very nice if rolled and stuffed, as here directed, and plainly roasted. It should be well basted and served with a good gravy and currant jelly.
Two versions of the same joint: a plain roast before an open fire, and a boned, spiced, stuffed and braised version that is really a different dish. Both assume mutton, which is not what most butchers sell now.
- Mutton is not lambMutton is sheep over two years old, with darker, coarser, much stronger-flavoured meat that rewards long cooking. What you will buy today is lamb (under a year) or, if you are lucky, hogget. Lamb loin cooks faster and needs less help from spice and wine.
- The fire, translated"A nice clear fire" means a spit or a bottle jack in front of glowing coals, with the joint turning and a dripping pan beneath. In an oven, roast a 6 lb bone-in loin at 400F for 20 minutes, then 350F, and go by internal temperature rather than the clock.
- The 1½ hour timingFifteen minutes to the pound at open-fire heat gives meat still pink at the centre. Modern practice is to pull lamb or mutton loin at 130-135F for medium-rare and rest it 15 minutes; in a hot oven a 6 lb joint may reach that inside the stated time, so go by a thermometer rather than the clock.
- Dredging and bastingFlouring the surface and basting builds the browned crust that a spit gives for free. In an oven the same effect comes from the initial high heat; basting every 20 minutes is enough, and opening the door more often costs you more than it gains.
- "Have the butcher joint it"For the roast, this means having the backbone cut through between the chops (often loosely called chining, though chining strictly means removing the chine bone) so the carver can cut down cleanly. Ask for it specifically; loins are now often sold already boned, which defeats the plain roast.
- A slow ovenRoughly 275-300F. The rolled loin is half-baked at that heat, cooled, then finished by gentle stewing, so the oven stage appears to be about rendering fat and setting the roll rather than cooking the meat through.
- ForcemeatBeeton's standard veal forcemeat: breadcrumbs, chopped suet, lemon zest, parsley, thyme, mace, and egg to bind, sometimes with minced ham or bacon. A sausagemeat-and-herb stuffing gives much the same result.
- Port, ketchup and spicesA "glass" of port is a wineglass, roughly 2 fl oz. Mushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquor, still sold and quite unlike tomato ketchup; a splash of Worcestershire plus a little soy is the nearest substitute. Pound the mace, allspice and cloves fresh — pre-ground mace in particular loses its point quickly.
- Hanging the meat"Hang till tender" meant days in a cold, airy larder, a technique that depended on a house with no central heating and a butcher who had already aged the carcass. Do not attempt it at room temperature; buy meat that has been dry-aged under refrigeration instead.
- YieldThe rolled version is given for eight. A 6 lb bone-in loin roasted plain will serve six to eight, generously if there are potatoes and a second vegetable.
Loin was one of the standard roasting joints of Victorian mutton cookery — fatter than the leg, and easily boned and rolled for a made dish. The rolled version here follows an older English style, in which a joint is spiced with mace, cloves, allspice and nutmeg, left to sit for a day, stuffed, and then finished in its own gravy with wine and a mushroom liquor: a treatment with something in common with earlier "collared" and potted meats. Mushroom ketchup, the salted-and-spiced mushroom liquor that appears throughout Beeton, was an everyday savoury bottle of the nineteenth-century kitchen before tomato ketchup displaced it. Red-currant jelly with mutton is a pairing generally traced to the older habit of serving sharp fruit with strong-flavoured meat, and it stayed on the British table long after the mutton itself began to disappear — by the mid-twentieth century most British sheep were being slaughtered as lamb, and the two-year-old animal Beeton assumes had become a specialist purchase.