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Saddle of Mutton, or Lamb
This cut of meat should always be prepared at the butcher's. Before cooking, wipe thoroughly, sprinkle with salt and pepper and at last moment dredge with flour. Sprinkle flour on bottom of dripping-pan, place the saddle on rack and bake in hot oven an hour or more, according to size, basting every fifteen minutes. Serve with mint sauce or currant jelly. Do not use a made gravy for this dish.
A saddle is the whole undivided loin section, both sides of the backbone with the kidneys usually removed — a roast of roughly 5 to 8 lb that needs a butcher's saw and a hot oven. The instructions are sparse but sound; the gaps are temperature and doneness.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clock"An hour or more, according to size" was written for a cook who judged by eye. A saddle is best pulled at 130-135F at the thickest part of the loin for medium-rare and rested 15 minutes; mutton, being older and stronger, is often taken a little further, to about 145F.
- "Hot oven"In period terms roughly 400-450F. Starting hot for 15-20 minutes to set the crust and dropping to 350F for the remainder is a common modern approach and gives a more even interior on a roast this thick.
- Mutton is not lambMutton means sheep over about two years, with darker meat, firmer fat and a much stronger flavour. It is uncommon in American supermarkets and generally special-ordered. A lamb saddle cooks faster and tastes milder; the recipe works for either, but not interchangeably in timing.
- Ask the butcher for it wholeThe instruction to have it "prepared at the butcher's" still holds. The chine bone must be cracked or removed, the flank ends trimmed and often tied under, and the fat scored. This is not a home boning job with a chef's knife.
- The flour in the panFlour dredged over the meat and scattered under it browns in the drippings and thickens the juices as they render. Use it sparingly — a heavy dusting scorches at 450F and turns the pan bitter.
- BastingEvery fifteen minutes was standard for lean roasts in a fickle oven. With a fat cap left on, basting three or four times over the hour is plenty; opening a modern oven repeatedly costs more heat than the basting gains.
- "Do not use a made gravy"The point is that a saddle is served with its own pan juices, skimmed of fat and perhaps loosened with a splash of stock or water — not a separate flour-and-broth sauce. The mint sauce (mint chopped in vinegar and sugar, not jelly) or currant jelly carries the sharpness instead.
- YieldA saddle of this size serves roughly 6 to 10 depending on weight, carved in long strips parallel to the backbone or in slices across the loin.
The saddle is the grandest cut a household could put on the table short of a whole animal, and its presence in a 1911 Butterick volume — a book aimed at the reasonably comfortable middle-class housekeeper rather than at hotel kitchens — signals a dish for company dinners and holidays. The pairing with mint sauce is English and long-standing; sharp vinegar-and-mint against fatty roast sheep is documented in British cookery well before the nineteenth century, and currant jelly ran alongside it as an alternative accompaniment. The instruction to refuse a made gravy is often read as reflecting a period distinction: a joint of this quality was thought to need nothing but its own drippings, and a flour-thickened sauce may have been seen as a way of stretching or disguising lesser meat, though this is inference rather than documented fact. Mutton itself was still ordinary eating in 1911 and had all but vanished from American markets by mid-century, as the sheep industry shifted away from it.