Home › Meat › Roast Leg of Mutton
Roast Leg of Mutton
I leg of mutton
Salt and pepper
Flour
Wipe the mutton with a damp cloth, remove the outside skin and excess of fat, sprinkle it with salt, pepper and flour, and place on a rack in a roasting-pan. Allow fifteen or twenty minutes to a pound for roasting. When the meat is done, remove it from the pan. Also remove all except one tablespoon of the fat. In this, brown two tablespoons flour, add one and one-half cups boiling water, and stir constantly until it thickens. Cook two minutes. Season to taste and strain. Serve as gravy.
A bare-bones roast in the style of the period, when a cook was assumed to know her own oven. Two things are missing from the text: a temperature and any notion of internal doneness.
- Mutton itselfMutton is sheep over two years old, with darker meat and a stronger, tallowy fat. Almost no American supermarket carries it; a bone-in leg of lamb of 5-7 lb is the practical substitute, and it will cook faster and taste milder.
- No oven temperature is givenRoasting instructions of this period often called for high heat at the start and steadier heat afterwards, but this book leaves the matter to the cook. As a modern working figure, 450F for the first 20 minutes, then 325F for the remainder.
- The timing is the weak pointFifteen to twenty minutes to the pound is a wide range, and the upper end will carry a leg past medium. Roast to internal temperature instead: 130-135F at the thickest part, away from the bone, for medium-rare, 145F for medium. On a 6 lb leg that is roughly 1.5 to 2 hours total.
- Rest before carvingThe recipe moves straight from oven to gravy. Let the leg stand 15-20 minutes under loose foil while you make the gravy; the juices redistribute and carving is far cleaner.
- Removing the skinThe "outside skin" is the papery fell over the fat. Take it off along with fat thicker than about a quarter inch, but leave a thin fat cap to baste the meat as it cooks.
- The gravyOne tablespoon of fat to two of flour is a stiff, dry roux; it will brown quickly and can scorch, so keep it moving over medium heat. Add the boiling water in stages rather than all at once to avoid lumps, and skim the rendered fat before it goes in if the drippings look greasy.
- StrainingStraining the gravy is worth doing here, as mutton drippings carry a good deal of browned sediment and stray fat that turn the sauce muddy.
- YieldA 6 lb bone-in leg serves eight generously, with enough left for cold slices. Traditional accompaniments in this book's era were currant or mint jelly and boiled potatoes.
Roast leg of mutton was the plain Sunday joint of English and Anglo-American cooking, and a reader of the period would have needed no more instruction than this. Mutton was cheap because sheep were kept for wool as well as meat and were often slaughtered only once past their productive prime, so the meat that reached the butcher was mature and assertive. American taste turned decisively toward young lamb across the first half of the twentieth century, helped along by refrigerated shipping; the wartime memories of tinned and boiled mutton often blamed for the shift are folk explanation rather than documented cause, and mutton persisted in some regional and ethnic markets well past mid-century. The recipe's confidence about flour-thickened pan gravy is equally of its time: the same three-step method, fat plus flour plus boiling liquid, appears under roast after roast in books of this generation, taught once and then assumed.