Home › T › The Mutton, Baked Minced
The Mutton, Baked Minced
(Cold Meat Cookery.) - INGREDIENTS. remains of any joint of cold roast mutton, 1 or 2 onions, 1 bunch of savoury herbs, pepper and salt to taste, 2 blades of pounded mace or nutmeg, 1 teacupful of gravy, mashed potatoes. AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the meat, 4d. (Cold Meat Cookery.) — INGREDIENTS. — The remains of any joint of cold roast mutton, 1 or 2 onions, 1 bunch of savoury herbs, pepper and salt to taste, 2 blades of pounded mace or nutmeg, 1 teacupful of gravy, mashed potatoes. AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the meat, 4d.
MUTTON, BREAST OF.
Mince an onion rather fine and fry it a light-brown colour, add the herbs and mutton, both of which should be also finely minced and well mixed; season with pepper and salt and a little pounded mace or nutmeg, and moisten with the above proportion of gravy. Put a layer of potatoes, mashed in the butter, at the bottom of a dish, then the mutton, and then another layer of potatoes, and bake for about 1/2 hour.
TIME. hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Note. If there should be a large quantity of meat, use 2 onions instead of 1.
A shepherd's pie in all but name, written for the Victorian household that had a Sunday joint to use up. Two lines in the text are printing artifacts rather than instructions.
- Ignore the stray heading"MUTTON, BREAST OF." sits mid-ingredient-list as a printing artifact and has nothing to do with this recipe. Likewise "TIME. hour" is a garbled line; the method gives the real figure, about half an hour.
- A teacupfulConventionally reckoned at about a quarter of a pint, so roughly 5 fl oz or 2/3 cup, though the recipe itself does not define it. Use good brown stock or leftover roast gravy; the mince should be moist but not soupy or it will loosen the potato layers.
- OvenNo temperature is given; the book leaves it to the cook. Half an hour at around 350-375F will brown the top and heat everything through.
- Blades of maceMace blades are the dried outer covering of nutmeg, sold whole and pounded in a mortar. Two blades pounded comes to roughly 1/4 teaspoon of ground mace; ground nutmeg in the same quantity is the substitute Beeton herself offers.
- The savoury herbsA Victorian bunch of savoury herbs usually meant parsley and thyme, often with marjoram and sometimes a bay leaf. Since they are minced in rather than steeped, drop the bay and use a tablespoon or so of chopped parsley and thyme.
- Quantities, since none are givenFor the remains of a joint, reckon on 1 to 1 1/4 lb of cooked meat, trimmed of gristle and fat. About 1 1/2 lb of potatoes, mashed with butter, will give you both layers. Serves three or four.
- The hinge: mince, do not processCooked mutton put through a food processor turns to paste and bakes into a dense block. Chop by hand or use the coarse plate of a mincer so the filling stays open-textured, and take the onion properly to the light-brown the recipe calls for, since it carries much of the dish's savour.
- Reheated cooked meatThe meat is already cooked, so the bake is a reheat. Bring the centre to 165F/74C rather than judging by the browning of the potato top, and cook it once only, not twice over.
Beeton's book has a whole class of recipes headed "Cold Meat Cookery" — a category that only makes sense in a house where a large joint was roasted for Sunday and had to feed people until Wednesday, with no refrigeration to keep it indefinitely. This particular combination of minced leftover meat between layers of mashed potato is the ancestor of what is now sold as shepherd's pie; the term "cottage pie" is documented from the end of the eighteenth century, while "shepherd's pie" appears later and is generally traced to the second half of the nineteenth, with the mutton-versus-beef distinction hardening only afterwards. The mace is a survival of an older English taste for warm spice in savoury meat dishes, and the costing of fourpence "exclusive of the meat" is the point of the whole entry: the expensive part was already paid for.