Home › M › Mutton, Roast Shoulder of
Mutton, Roast Shoulder of
INGREDIENTS. Shoulder of mutton; a little salt. AVERAGE COST, Id. per lb.
Put the joint down to a bright, clear fire; flour it well and keep continually basting.
About hour before serving, draw it near the fire, that the outside may acquire a SHOULDER OF MUTTON. nice brown colour, but not sufficiently near to blacken the fat. Sprinkle a little fine salt over the meat, empty the dripping-pan of its contents, pour in a little boiling SEASONABLE all the year, but more suit- water slightly salted, and strain this over TIME.-About 3 hours. able in winter.
This is open-hearth roasting written down at the point when it was already giving way to the closed oven: the joint hangs before a clear fire, is floured, basted and browned by moving it closer to the coals. The method translates to an oven, but a few of Mrs Beeton's instructions only make sense once you know what the fire was doing.
- Oven equivalentFor a shoulder of about 5-6 lb, roast at 350F for roughly 2 to 2 1/2 hours for well-done meat on the bone, then raise the heat to 425F for the last 15 minutes to brown the fat. The original's 3 hours reflects a fire that heats only one side of the joint at a time.
- "Flour it well"A dusting of flour over the wet surface of the meat was the standard way to build a crust and hold basting fat against the joint. It is optional in an oven; dry the surface well and salt it instead if you want crisp fat.
- BastingContinual basting mattered at a fire, where the exposed surface dried out fast. In an oven, baste two or three times at most. Opening the door repeatedly costs more than the basting gains.
- The gravy is the pointThe last sentence is the whole method for the sauce: pour the fat off the dripping pan, add a little boiling salted water to the browned residue, scrape it loose and strain it. That is a thin deglazed pan juice, not a thickened gravy, and it wants to be served very hot.
- Mutton, not lambMutton is sheep over two years old, darker and much stronger-tasting; almost nothing sold as lamb today resembles it. Specialist butchers and halal butchers sometimes carry mutton. A lamb shoulder of the same weight will cook faster and taste far milder.
- Shoulder is not legShoulder is fattier and more sinewy than leg, which is why it takes to long roasting. It carves awkwardly around the blade bone; ask for it boned and rolled if you want neat slices, and add about 20 minutes to allow for the denser rolled shape.
- Cost note"Id." is a garbled reading of the printed price; the intended figure cannot be recovered with confidence from this text, and a literal one penny per pound would be well below what mutton generally fetched at the time.
- YieldA bone-in shoulder of 5-6 lb serves six to eight, with enough left for the cold mutton and hash dishes that fill several neighbouring entries in this book.
Roast shoulder of mutton was ordinary English dinner-table food for most of the nineteenth century, when sheep were kept as much for wool and were often said to be killed at three or four years old, giving meat with a depth of flavour that modern fast-grown lamb does not have. The instructions here describe the older technique of roasting in front of the fire rather than in it, with a dripping-pan beneath to catch the fat, and the note that the joint is "seasonable all the year, but more suitable in winter" reflects the appetite for heavy roasts in cold houses. The habit of pouring boiling water into the emptied dripping-pan is a thrift measure as much as a culinary one: nothing browned onto that pan was to be wasted, and the fat itself was saved for pastry, frying and dripping on bread. Britain's taste for mutton faded through the twentieth century as breeding shifted toward earlier slaughter, and the word largely vanished from butchers' shops, though the meat has been quietly revived in recent decades by producers and by cooks in South Asian and Caribbean kitchens where mature sheep never went out of use.