Roast Mutton
Get a leg of eight pounds, which has hung about a week, weather allowing During hot weather this joint gets quickly tainted. Rub it lightly with salt and put it at once before a brisk, sharp fire. Place it close to the fire for five minutes, then place it in the oven and let it roast slowly until done. Baste continually with good dripping until that from the joint begins to flow. When within twenty minutes of being done, sprinkle it with barley flour, and baste with butter or dripping; and when the froth rises, serve on a hot dish. Make a gravy, throw off the fat, when any gravy, if the dripping pan has been floured, will adhere to it. Add a little stock and a little boiling water, pepper and salt. Pour the gravy around the meat, not over it.
An open-hearth method written for a coal range, applied to a joint most butchers no longer stock. The technique translates well once you sort out the fire, the flour and the meat itself.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is sheep over two years old, stronger in flavour and firmer than lamb. If you cannot get it, use an 8 lb leg of hogget (one to two years) or lamb; lamb will cook faster and taste much milder.
- The hanging"Hung about a week" describes dry-ageing in a cold larder, not leaving meat on a counter. Buy a leg already aged by a butcher and keep it refrigerated at or below 40F until it goes in the oven. The recipe's own warning about hot weather is the period's acknowledgement that this step went wrong easily.
- "A brisk, sharp fire"The five minutes close to the fire is a sear. In an oven you can approximate it by starting the leg hot, around 450F, before dropping to 325F for the long roast, though that initial blast will run longer than the recipe's five minutes. Note that the original itself moves the joint from the fire into the oven, so it assumes a kitchen with both rather than a spit alone.
- Timing and donenessAt 325F allow roughly 15 to 18 minutes per pound after the initial sear, but work from temperature, not the clock: 130 to 135F at the thickest part of the leg for pink, 145F for medium. Rest it 20 minutes before carving.
- Dripping and basting"Good dripping" is rendered beef or mutton fat. Use beef dripping, lard or clarified butter; the point of basting until the joint's own fat runs is simply to keep the surface from drying before it starts self-basting.
- The barley flour and "the froth"Flour scattered over the fat-slicked surface in the last twenty minutes puffs and browns into a crisp coating, the "froth" the recipe waits for. Plain wheat flour works; barley flour browns a shade darker and tastes faintly nutty. Serve as soon as it colours or it will soften.
- The gravyFlour dusted into the pan means the pan juices thicken and cling once the clear fat is poured off. Deglaze with a little stock and boiling water, season, and strain. The recipe specifies pouring it around rather than over the joint; the likeliest reason is to spare the floured crust, though it does not say so.
- YieldAn 8 lb bone-in leg serves 10 to 12, with enough left cold for a second meal, which is how the period expected such a joint to be used.
Roast leg of mutton was a standard centrepiece joint in nineteenth-century Anglo-American cooking, treated as everyday Sunday fare rather than special-occasion cookery, and its cold remains were carried into later meals. The instructions' move from the fire into the oven reflects a kitchen where an open grate and a range oven were both to hand. "Frothing" a joint with flour and butter at the end is an older English kitchen practice, found in cookery books well before this one, intended to give a browned, crisp finish before serving. Mutton's slide out of favour came later, as fast-growing lamb breeds and year-round supply made the older, stronger meat harder to sell; in much of the English-speaking world it is now a specialist order rather than a butcher's staple.