Curried Mutton
Prepare one pound of cold tender mutton, by cutting it in small square pieces. Heat two tablespoons of butter boiling hot and in it brown lightly two ounces of finely minced onion; add one ounce of curry powder and one saltspoonful of salt and stir all thoroughly together over the fire. Now add the mutton and just enough stock or broth to soften but not to liquify the mass. Stir gently ten or fifteen minutes, pile it on a dish, surround it with rice and serve.
A leftover dish: it assumes a Sunday joint already roasted and gone cold, and it takes about twenty minutes from start to table. Two measurements need translating before you begin.
- An ounce of curry powderThat is roughly four level tablespoons for one pound of meat, which is a very assertive amount by modern standards; commercial curry powders of the period were generally milder than contemporary blends. Start with one to two tablespoons of a contemporary blend and add more once the sauce has come together.
- SaltspoonfulA quarter teaspoon. Cold roast mutton is usually already seasoned, so taste before adding more.
- Two ounces of onionAbout a third of a medium onion, or a generous third of a cup once minced. Mince it fine so it melts into the sauce rather than sitting in it.
- Frying the powder is the hingeThe curry powder goes into the hot butter with the onion and is stirred over heat before any liquid arrives. Skip that and the dish tastes raw and dusty; give it 30 to 60 seconds, no longer, or the ground spice scorches and turns bitter.
- "Soften but not liquify"Add stock a few tablespoons at a time. The finished dish should be moist enough to hold together when piled on a plate, not a soup — expect somewhere around half a cup for a pound of meat.
- The meat is already cookedTen to fifteen minutes of gentle stirring is for warming through and letting the meat take up the sauce, not for tenderising. Keep it at a bare simmer; a hard boil will squeeze cold roast mutton dry and stringy.
- Finding muttonMature mutton is rare outside halal and specialist butchers. Cold roast lamb shoulder or leg works directly, and is milder; if you use lamb, the curry powder quantity in the original will overwhelm it.
- YieldOne pound of cooked meat serves three, or four with a generous ring of rice. The recipe specifies only "rice"; plain boiled rice suits it.
Curried leftovers were a fixture of English and American middle-class cookery by the time this book appeared, and mutton was a common candidate — the big roast joint of the nineteenth-century household, strongly flavoured enough to stand up to spice on its second appearance. The technique here is Anglo-Indian at one remove: curry reached British kitchens through the East India Company, and by the nineteenth century ready-mixed "curry powder" was widely sold by grocers, which is what the recipe assumes rather than any freshly ground blend. The Butterick book was published by a pattern company for practical housekeepers, and the whole point is thrift: a pound of cold meat, a little onion, and stock from the same animal, made into a hot dish that does not read as a leftover.