Home › Recipes For The Chafing-Dish › Mutton with Currant Jelly Sauce
Mutton with Currant Jelly Sauce
2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour ¼ teaspoon salt Few grains pepper 1 cup Brown Stock 1/3 cup currant jelly 1½ tablespoons Sherry wine 6 slices cold cooked mutton Brown the butter, add flour, seasonings, and stock, gradually; then add jelly, and when melted, add mutton. When meat is heated, add wine. If mutton gravy is at hand, use instead of making a Brown Sauce.
A chafing-dish way of reheating yesterday's roast leg or shoulder without drying it out. The sauce is a plain brown roux sweetened and sharpened with jelly, and the mutton is only warmed through in it.
- The hinge: do not let the meat cookThe mutton is already cooked. Slip the slices into the finished sauce over the lowest heat and let them warm two or three minutes at most. Simmering shreds cold roast meat and turns it grey and stringy.
- Salt quantityThe salt reads as a quarter teaspoon in the original scheme of this book; season lightly at the start and correct at the end, since the stock and the jelly both push the balance around.
- Browning the butterCook the butter until it smells nutty and turns the colour of a hazelnut shell, then add the flour and cook that too. This is what gives the sauce its colour, and it is easy to take it a shade too far -- past dark brown it goes bitter.
- Brown StockThe book's Brown Stock is made from beef and bone, with part of the meat browned before it is simmered. A good unsalted beef stock does the job; the recipe's own suggestion of using mutton gravy instead is the better option if you have the roast's drippings.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, the firm-set clear kind, not a currant preserve with fruit in it. If it is unavailable, a tart red jelly such as redcurrant-and-cranberry is closer than grape, which is too sweet and flat.
- SherryAdd it off the heat at the very end so the aroma survives. A dry or medium-dry sherry suits the sweetness of the jelly better than a cream sherry.
- Chafing dish or panA wide skillet over low heat works identically. If you use a chafing dish, make the sauce over the direct flame, then move to the water pan to hold the meat warm.
- YieldSix slices and roughly a cup and a third of sauce serves three as a lunch dish, two if it is the main course. Serve on toast points or with plain boiled potatoes to take up the sauce.
Mutton with currant jelly belongs to a long Anglo-American habit of pairing sheep meat with a sharp sweet fruit accompaniment, the same logic that puts mint sauce beside roast lamb. Chafing dishes were fashionable equipment in the middle-class household of the 1890s and 1900s: a spirit lamp, a blazer pan and a water bath let a hostess cook at table, and many of the recipes written for such cooking are built from something already cooked. Mutton -- older sheep, stronger flavoured, and commoner on American tables then than now -- was bought and roasted in large joints, and a household needed a repertoire for the cold remains. The instruction to use the roast's own gravy if it is at hand rather than build a fresh brown sauce is a frugal aside typical of such cookery writing.