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Boiled Mutton or Lamb
Trim and wipe the meat. Have ready kettle of rapidly boiling salted water.
Immerse meat, boil hard five minutes, then reduce to gentle simmer. Allow fifteen minutes per pound. Lamb should always be well done; mutton may be rare. A little rice may be added to water to keep meat white.
A plain boiled joint of the kind that once anchored a weeknight dinner. The method is sound; the only real decisions are the cut, the pot and where you stop cooking.
- The hinge: hard boil, then simmerThe five minutes of hard boiling firms the surface; after that the water must never return to a rolling boil or the muscle tightens and squeezes out moisture. Hold it at a bare shiver, 180-190F, with the lid ajar.
- KettleA "kettle" here is a large stockpot, not a tea kettle. You want enough water to cover the joint by two inches, and salt it at about a tablespoon per quart.
- Mutton is not on saleMutton is sheep over roughly two years old, strong-flavoured and firm; it turns up now mainly through halal butchers and small farms. A 4-5 lb lamb leg or boned shoulder substitutes directly, and will cook a little faster.
- Fifteen minutes per pound, verifiedFifteen minutes per pound -- The rule works for a boned and tied joint but not for anything thin or awkwardly shaped. Use a thermometer at the thickest point away from bone: 145F for pink lamb, 160-165F for the firm, sliceable texture this recipe is aiming at.
- "Mutton may be rare" reads oddly nowThe recipe reflects a convention of cooking lamb through while allowing mature mutton to stay pinker; modern practice does not follow it. Either is safe once the interior passes 145F and holds there briefly.
- The rice trickA handful of rice, or a little flour tied in muslin, clouds the water and was thought to keep the outside of the joint pale rather than grey-brown. It may soften the colour, and it will thicken the cooking liquid slightly, which is no loss.
- Skim, and keep the brothSkim the grey foam in the first ten minutes or it settles back onto the meat. The strained liquid is good stock; add an onion, a carrot and a few peppercorns after the meat goes in if you want it worth keeping.
- Yield and servingA 4-5 lb joint serves six to eight. The expected accompaniment is caper sauce -- a white sauce made with some of the cooking liquid, finished with capers and a little of their vinegar -- with mashed turnip or potatoes.
Boiling was the default treatment for a leg of mutton in British and American kitchens well into the twentieth century, partly because it needed no oven and partly because it produced two dishes at once: the joint and the broth beneath it. Mutton was then the ordinary meat of sheep-raising regions, lamb the seasonal luxury, which is why this recipe treats them as one entry with a note on doneness rather than as separate dishes. The instruction to plunge meat into fast-boiling water to "seal in the juices" comes from a nineteenth-century theory of searing generally traced to the chemist Justus von Liebig; the sealing does not actually happen, though the brief hard boil does firm the surface and help keep the joint tidy.