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Baked Breast of Mutton
Sew up a breast of mutton in a very thin cloth, put it into a stewpan, pour over sufficient water to nearly cover it, and let it stew very slowly, allowing ten minutes to each pound, counting from the time the water begins to simmer. Remove it from the saucepan, take off the cloth, put it in a baking-dish, rub it over with warm dripping or butter, sprinkle on some flour, and bake for half an hour, basting often with its own broth. Five minutes before removing it from the oven, strew fine dry breadcrumbs thickly over it, add small pieces of butter here and there, and let it brown. Put it on a hot dish, garnish with slices of beet root, and serve.
A two-stage treatment of a cheap, fatty cut: a slow poach to render and tenderise, then a short bake to crust it. The instructions assume a butcher's mutton breast and a coal range, and both need translating.
- The cutBreast of mutton is the belly section, layered fat, thin meat and rib cartilage. Mutton (sheep over two years) is a special order in most places now; a lamb breast of 2 to 3 lb is the usual substitute and will be milder and considerably less fatty. Ask for it boned and rolled if you want neat slices.
- Ten minutes to the pound is too shortThat rate suits a tender joint, not a collagen-heavy breast. A breast wants 1½ to 2 hours at a bare simmer before the connective tissue gives way; underdone, it slices rubbery and the fat stays unrendered. Test by whether a skewer slides through the meat between the ribs without resistance.
- The clothSewing the joint into thin cloth (butter muslin or cheesecloth) holds a boned, rolled breast in shape and keeps the surface clean for browning. Kitchen string tied at intervals does the same job with less sewing.
- No oven temperature is givenFor the half-hour browning stage use 400F. The joint is already cooked through, so the oven is only setting the flour coating and crisping the fat.
- DrippingBeef or pork dripping, the fat saved from earlier roasts. Butter is given as the alternative in the recipe itself; the skimmed fat off the poaching broth works as well as either.
- Basting with its own brothStrain and skim the poaching liquid first. Unskimmed, it will pool as grease in the dish rather than glazing the surface, and the flour coating will slide off.
- The crumb finishFive minutes is right. Dry crumbs over hot fat colour fast and can catch quickly at this heat, so watch rather than time it.
- The beetroot garnishCooked beets, sliced and often dressed with a little vinegar, cutting the richness. Serve them cold against the hot meat.
- YieldA 3 lb breast serves four, generously three, once the bones and rendered fat are accounted for.
Breast was among the cheapest joints on the sheep and appears constantly in nineteenth-century English household cookery, where the problem was always how to make a fatty, bony cut palatable at table. Boiling first and baking after is the standard solution: the simmer renders fat and softens gristle, the oven supplies the browned surface a plain boiled joint lacks. Oscar Tschirky's book of 1896 sets English domestic material of this kind alongside the hotel's restaurant dishes, and phrasing such as "allowing ten minutes to each pound" is common in British cookery manuals of the period. Mutton was ordinary meat in America then and had largely disappeared from the market by the middle of the twentieth century, as sheep farming shifted toward lambs slaughtered young.