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Rocky Mountain Sheep
First catch your wild mutton (you can't do it by putting salt on his tail), then slice him into 11/2-inch steaks. Slash into strips 1-inch wide and marinate in orange juice 6 hours, or overnight. Then break out the trusty, rusty skillet, melt butter in it until it smokes, drain and dry the luscious chunks of red meat, and fry 4-5 minutes. Stir in a couple of cups of meat stock (from cubes), thicken with a handful of flour, season well, and go to it.
Or you can roast it the same as lamb, and eat it with mint jelly.
A camp recipe written for meat almost nobody buys. The method is sound for any lean, dark game leg or loin, but the timings assume thin strips and a very hot pan.
- The meatBighorn sheep is taken only on a limited, drawn tag and cannot legally be sold, so this is a recipe for a hunter's kitchen. Lamb or mutton leg, goat, or venison loin all behave much the same; expect wild sheep to be leaner and to cook faster than the same weight of lamb.
- Cut it as described, in that orderSlice 1½-inch steaks first, then cut those into 1-inch strips. The result is a chunk that browns hard on the outside while staying pink in the middle, which is the whole point with lean meat.
- Orange juice is a tenderizer, not a flavoringOrange juice works on the surface as much as it flavours -- Six hours is plenty, and the recipe's own outside limit is overnight. Long citrus marinades can leave the outer layer pale and soft.
- Dry the meat, and don't rely on butter aloneDrying is the instruction that decides whether you get a crust or a grey braise. Butter "until it smokes" means burnt butter in a modern pan; use clarified butter, or half butter and half neutral oil, over high heat.
- Four to five minutes totalThat is the correct order of magnitude for 1-inch strips in a hot skillet, turning once or twice, and it lands around medium-rare. Wild sheep is very lean and turns dry and livery if pushed past medium.
- "A handful of flour"Read it as about 3 tablespoons for two cups of stock. Whisk it into a little cold stock or soft butter first and stir that in, rather than throwing dry flour into the pan, or the gravy will be lumpy.
- Season at the endBouillon cubes carry a great deal of salt. Build the gravy, let it simmer a minute, then taste before adding anything.
- If you roast it insteadThe recipe gives no temperature. A bone-in leg at 325F, pulled at 130-135F internal and rested fifteen minutes, is one modern reading of 'the same as lamb'. Roasting a wild leg to well done will dry it out.
Rocky Mountain bighorn was a prized game animal of the mountain West, and 'wild mutton' was one of the terms used for it. Market hunting and disease from domestic sheep flocks reduced the herds sharply by about 1900, and the animal spent much of the twentieth century as the object of restoration programs rather than dinner. The technique itself is older than the game laws: acid marinade, hard sear in fat, then a quick pan gravy thickened with flour and stretched with whatever stock the camp had, here frankly acknowledged as cubes. The closing line about mint jelly is a nod to the domestic sheep that the wild one is forever being compared to.