Home › Fireless Cookery › Boiled Leg of Mutton
Boiled Leg of Mutton
Place mutton in kettle and cover with boiling water. Boil for thirty minutes and place in cooker for three hours, using one radiator.
This is a retained-heat recipe, written for a fireless cooker: an insulated box in which food is brought to a boil on the stove and then finished by its own stored heat. Almost everything you need to know is hidden in the word "radiator."
- What a "radiator" isA fireless cooker's radiator is a soapstone or cast-iron disc heated on the range and set in the well beneath (or above) the cooking vessel. Directions of the period generally called for one radiator for boiling and stewing and two for roasting and baking. Nothing in a modern kitchen corresponds to it.
- The modern substituteA heavy covered pot in a 200-225F oven, or a slow cooker on low, will finish the joint with better control, though both hold a steady temperature rather than the falling heat of the original. Keep the initial thirty-minute boil on the stovetop either way; that stage is what carries the meat and the water up to temperature before the insulation takes over.
- MuttonMutton is sheep over about two years old, darker and far stronger in flavour than lamb, and it is a special-order item in most of North America. A 5 to 6 lb bone-in leg of lamb behaves similarly here but is milder and will be done sooner; true mutton wants the full three hours or more.
- Cover with boiling waterBoiling, not cold. Adding cold water to a fireless cooker load wastes the heat budget the whole method depends on, and the pot must go into the insulation at a rolling boil to hold usefully hot for three hours.
- Check the meat, not the clockRetained-heat cooking is unforgiving of guesswork because the temperature is always dropping. A leg is ready at 175-185F at the thickest part, away from the bone, which gives the sliceable, fully set texture this dish is meant to have. If the water has gone lukewarm at the three-hour mark, return the pot to the stove rather than extending the time in the box.
- Seasoning the original assumesNothing is listed, but boiled mutton was usually seasoned: salt the water well and add an onion stuck with cloves, a carrot, a few peppercorns and a bay leaf. Otherwise both meat and broth come out flat.
- The liquid is half the pointSkim the pot before it goes into the cooker. The strained broth is the base for the caper sauce that traditionally goes with boiled mutton, and for barley soup the next day.
- YieldA leg of this size serves six to eight, carved in slices down to the bone and served hot on a warmed platter, since the fat sets quickly.
Fireless cookery was a genuine movement rather than a novelty, at its height in the United States between roughly 1905 and the end of the First World War. The principle is much older than the appliance - the Norwegian hay box, food buried in an insulated nest to finish slowly - but it was marketed in this period as scientific housekeeping: less fuel, no watching, no scorching, and a kitchen that stayed cool in August. Commercial cookers with felt or mineral-wool linings and soapstone radiators sold widely, and cookbooks of the era carried whole sections of recipes rewritten for them, which is why a book of general household cookery has one here. Boiled leg of mutton itself is much older and thoroughly British, a plain-cooking standard usually sent to table with caper sauce or onion sauce; it suited the fireless cooker because a large joint in a great deal of hot water holds heat well and asks only for time.