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Minced Mutton
2 cups chopped cooked mutton Yolks 6 "hard-boiled" eggs ¾ teaspoon mixed mustard
The text as printed is only the ingredient column; the method that followed it has been lost in the scan. What survives still tells you most of what the dish was, and a few things need translating.
- The missing methodMinces of this kind were commonly built on a butter-and-flour base slackened with stock or cream, seasoned, then the meat folded in and heated only until hot through, but the method for this one is lost and cannot be recovered from the fragment. Nothing in the printed list supplies a liquid, so it cannot be followed as it stands.
- "34 teaspoon"An OCR artefact for 3/4 teaspoon. Mixed mustard means prepared wet mustard from the jar, not dry powder, so do not substitute measure for measure.
- The egg yolksSix hard-boiled yolks would add body and richness rather than serving as a garnish, though with the method missing their exact use is uncertain. Sieving or mashing them with a little of the hot sauce before stirring in keeps them from staying grainy. The whites are not called for here.
- MuttonMeat from a sheep over a year old, strongly flavoured and now sold mainly by halal butchers and specialist farms. Cooked leg or shoulder of lamb stands in without much fuss, though the result is milder; two cups is roughly 10 to 12 oz of chopped meat.
- Chop, do not grind"Minced" here points to small irregular pieces of cooked meat, whether cut by knife or put through a hand chopper. A food processor turns cooked mutton to paste and the dish loses its texture.
- Heat, don't cookThe meat is already cooked. Anything past a few minutes at a bare simmer tightens the fibres and dries it out.
- YieldTwo cups of meat with the sauce it needs serves three or four, on toast points or similar.
The recipe belongs to a specific moment: through the 1890s and early 1900s the spirit-lamp chafing dish was a fashionable wedding present and the centre of informal late-evening entertaining, cooking done in front of guests rather than below stairs. Recipes of that kind lean heavily on things already cooked, because a spirit lamp gives gentle heat and nothing more. Minced mutton is squarely a leftovers dish, the Sunday roast joint reappearing on Monday or Tuesday, dressed up with mustard and sieved yolks so it could be served without apology. Mutton was still ordinary meat then; the shift in American taste toward young lamb, and away from the older, stronger-flavoured sheep, came later, which is why a recipe that once needed no explanation now needs a note on where to buy the main ingredient.