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Boiled Leg of Mutton
Wipe meat, place in a kettle, and cover with boiling water. Bring quickly to boiling-point, boil five minutes, and skim. Set on back of range and simmer until meat is tender. When half done, add one tablespoon salt. Serve with Caper Sauce, or add to two cups White Sauce (made of one-half milk and one-half Mutton Stock), two "hardboiled" eggs cut in slices.
A plain boiled joint of the sort that anchored a Victorian dinner table. The whole thing turns on heat control: this should never actually boil after the first five minutes.
- "Back of the range"A coal range had a cooler zone at the rear where a pot would hold just below a boil. On a modern burner that means the lowest setting, with the surface barely shivering at around 180-190F. A rolling boil will squeeze the meat and leave it stringy.
- Mutton itselfMutton is sheep over two years old, with a stronger flavour and more fat than lamb. Most butchers now sell only lamb; a 5-7 lb bone-in leg of lamb behaves the same way, though it cooks faster and tastes milder. Halal and Caribbean butchers are the likeliest source of true mutton or hogget.
- TimingThe recipe gives none. Reckon roughly 20-25 minutes per pound at a simmer after the initial boil, so about two to two and a half hours for a 6 lb leg. Tender here means a fork slides in easily; the meat is meant to be fully cooked through, not pink.
- The initial boil and skimThe five hard minutes bring the surface scum up in a mass so it can be lifted off cleanly. Skim more than once if needed, and do it before adding anything else, or the froth settles back onto the joint.
- Salting halfwayOne tablespoon of salt in a large kettle of water is a light hand by modern standards. Adding it partway through was thought to keep juices in; in practice you can salt from the start, and a heavier hand seasons the meat and the stock together.
- The cooking liquidThe liquid left in the kettle can stand as the mutton stock the sauce calls for. Strain and reserve it for the white sauce, and skim the fat off the top before it goes into the pan.
- White sauceEssentially a bechamel, though here half the liquid is stock rather than milk: roughly 2 tablespoons each butter and flour cooked together, then 2 cups liquid (half milk, half the strained mutton stock) whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. The sliced hard-cooked eggs go in at the end, off the heat, so they do not break up.
- Caper sauceThe alternative is the same white sauce with a few tablespoons of drained capers and a little of their brine stirred in. The acid is the point, cutting the fat of the mutton.
- YieldA leg of this size serves eight to ten, with cold meat left for hash or a shepherd's pie the next day.
Boiled mutton with caper sauce was one of the defining plain dishes of nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookery, common enough in Britain that it is often recalled as a fixture of the period's fiction and English enough that American cookbooks reproduced it without comment. Fannie Farmer's book, first published in 1896 for the Boston Cooking School, still treated mutton as an ordinary market meat, handled together with lamb; American sheep of the period are generally said to have been kept largely for wool, and the animals reaching the butcher were mature. The capers are not decoration but the traditional counterweight to strong fat, a role vinegar or a sharp jelly plays in other mutton dishes. As American sheep farming shifted toward meat breeds slaughtered young, mutton faded from ordinary shopping lists in the twentieth century, and with it a whole family of boiled-joint recipes like this one.