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Boiled Shoulder of Mutton
Bone the shoulder; fill the space with pine nuts; dust all with flour; wrap in cheesecloth and plunge in a kettle of boiling water. Boil rapidly for five minutes; then simmer for two hours. Serve with caper cauce. • Leg of Mutton
A plain boiled joint of the old English kind, with the one unusual touch being a cavity packed with pine nuts. The instructions assume a cook who knows how to bone a shoulder and how to keep a large kettle at a bare tremble.
- Mutton, and what to use insteadMutton is sheep over a year old, and is essentially unavailable in most markets now. A boned lamb shoulder of 3-4 lb behaves similarly but is milder and more tender; if you can find hogget or mature mutton from a halal butcher or a farm, keep the timing as written.
- The boningAsk the butcher to bone the shoulder and leave it in one piece rather than netting or rolling it, so there is a pocket for the nuts. Keep the bones for the cooking water, which is the only seasoning this dish gets otherwise.
- Why boiling water firstPlunging the floured, wrapped joint into water at a full boil sets the flour coating quickly, which helps keep the pocket closed, though the cloth is doing most of that work. Five minutes rapid, then drop the heat to a bare simmer, around 180-190F; a genuine rolling boil for two hours would shred the meat and cloud the broth.
- The cheeseclothTwo layers, tied at both ends like a bolster. It holds the shape of a boned joint that would otherwise unroll, and lets you lift the whole thing out without it falling apart.
- Pine nutsRoughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup will fill the space in a lamb shoulder. They soften considerably over two hours and read as a rich, faintly resinous stuffing rather than as crunch.
- Seasoning is absentThe original adds no salt at any point; whether a salted cooking liquor or simply a well-seasoned sauce was assumed is not stated. Salt the water generously, roughly as you would for pasta, or the joint will taste flat.
- Timing and donenessTwo hours suits a 3-4 lb boned joint; add 20 minutes per additional pound. Shoulder is a working muscle, so aim for 175-185F internally, where the connective tissue has gone soft, rather than any pink-in-the-middle target.
- Caper sauce"Cauce" is a typesetting slip. The period sauce is a white sauce or drawn butter thinned with a ladle of the mutton broth, with two or three tablespoons of drained capers and a little of their vinegar stirred in at the end.
- Yield, and the stray lineServes six to eight, sliced across the grain. The "Leg of Mutton" at the end appears to be the heading of the following recipe rather than part of these instructions.
Boiled mutton with caper sauce was one of the fixed points of nineteenth-century English and Anglo-American cookery, plain enough to be served at a family dinner and respectable enough for a boarding house table; the capers' sharpness is often said to have cut the strong fat of an older sheep, and the pairing survived long after the meat itself began to disappear. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format, with each dish on its own removable sheet, let a housekeeper rearrange and add to the collection. The pine-nut filling is the one flourish here and reads as a borrowing from Mediterranean practice, where pignoli have long been used to stuff and enrich lamb; by the time this book appeared, mutton was already slipping out of the American diet.