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Baked Leg of Mutton
Wipe the mutton with a damp cloth, sprinkle it with salt, pepper and flour, and place on a meatrack in a roasting-pan; roast in a hot oven, allowing fifteen minutes to a pound. Baste every fifteen minutes, dredging with a slight sprinkle of flour, salt and pepper at each basting. When done place on a platter. Place the dripping-pan upon the top of the stove, and drain off all but one tablespoon of the fat. Add a little flour and stir until a nice brown, after which add boiling water, stirring constantly, until the gravy is of the desired consistency. Strain and send to table in a sauceboat. Serve with currant or other tart jelly.
A plain roast in the English manner, written for a coal range and a joint far larger and older than anything most butchers sell now. The method still works; the timing and the meat both need translating.
- Mutton vs. lambMutton is sheep over about two years old, with dense dark meat and a strong flavour; it is sold now mainly by halal butchers and specialist farms. A bone-in leg of lamb of 5-7 lb is the ordinary substitute, and it will cook faster and taste milder.
- "Hot oven"In this period that means roughly 425-450F. For a leg that size, start at 450F for the first 20 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 350F for the remainder rather than holding the high heat throughout.
- Fifteen minutes to the poundThat rule assumes thoroughly cooked meat and an unreliable oven. Cook to internal temperature instead: 130-135F at the thickest part, away from the bone, for pink lamb; 145-155F for the firmer, more thoroughly cooked joint this book expected. Mutton, being tougher, is more forgiving of the longer time.
- RestingThe original sends the joint straight to a platter while the gravy is made, which is in effect a rest. Give it 15-20 minutes loosely covered before carving; the pan gravy takes about that long.
- The repeated flour dredgingFlouring at each basting builds a thin savoury crust and, incidentally, thickens the pan drippings. Use a fine sieve or shaker and a genuinely slight dusting, or you get pasty patches instead of a crust.
- The gravyOne tablespoon of reserved fat wants about one tablespoon of flour. Cook the roux until it is properly nut-brown before the water goes in, or the gravy tastes raw and floury; add boiling water in stages, not all at once.
- Meatrack and dripping-panAny roasting rack that lifts the joint clear of the pan will do. "Dripping-pan" is simply the roasting pan; the instruction to set it on the stovetop assumes metal, so avoid glass or ceramic if you intend to make the gravy in it.
- Yield and accompanimentA 6 lb leg serves eight generously. The currant jelly is not optional decoration -- the sharp sweetness is the traditional foil to fatty mutton, and mint sauce serves the same purpose.
Roast leg of mutton was the backbone of the English Sunday dinner, and American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s inherited it wholesale along with its usual companion, red currant jelly. The book is generally said to have come from the Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, and to have been issued around the turn of the century for the same middle-class household that bought its magazines; the recipe reflects a moment when mutton was still an everyday market item in the United States -- sheep were kept largely for wool, and the older carcasses went to the table. As wool declined and consumers came to prefer the milder, quicker-cooking meat of young animals, mutton grew scarce at American butchers' counters, and "lamb" became the default. The instruction to make gravy directly in the dripping-pan on the stovetop is a reminder that this was written for a flat-topped range, where the roasting pan doubled as a saucepan the moment the joint came out.