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Braised Leg of Mutton
Put a leg of mutton in a braising pan with some slices of fat bacon on top and underneath it; put in also four carrots, two onions, a few meat bones, a bay leaf, a bunch of sweet herbs, and three gills of gravy. Put the pan over a fire with hot ashes on the cover, and cook the contents slowly until done. Remove the leg of mutton, place it on a dish, and glaze; take off the fat from the gravy to strain, pour it over, and serve.
Braised Boned Leg of Mutton, Milanese Style The following recipe is a favorite dish of the Milanese, but the Italians of Rome and Naples are not so fond of it, as they think it has a woolly flavor. Remove the bone from a leg of mutton, and bone it as follows from the thick end down to the first joint; chop it off at the first joint, push in a knife near the joint to loosen the flesh, leaving the tendons and gristle on the bone; then commence at the small or tail end and scrape away the fat from the backbone and follow the bone up until the joint is reached, continuing in this way until all the bone is out. The cavity may be stuffed and sewed up at the thin end. Then bring the edges together at the upper end, pushing all the flesh inside and sew the skin tightly together, which will give a rectangular form of solid meat and stuffing. To cut it straight down to the bone or to take it out would spoil it and much of the juice would escape, and if sewed up it would be very unsightly, but by this way the juice is preserved, and when the meat is cold it does not become dry and hard. Fill the cavity with breadcrumbs soaked in broth and squeezed quite dry, adding a mixture of garlic, eggs, mushrooms, bacon, ham and pepper. Sew up the place where it was cut so that the stuffing will not fall out, and put it in an earthenware stewpan, with some small pieces of melted fat bacon. Put the pan over the fire and fry gently until it is a light color, turning often. Sprinkle over salt and pepper, add a few vegetables cut in slices, and pour in a wineglassful each of white wine and broth. Cover with a round of paper, put some hot ashes on the lid, and braise for about four hours, adding a little more broth occasionally, and when done put it on a dish and keep hot. Add a little gravy or broth to the liquor in which it was cooked, bring to a boil, strain it, remove all the fat, and reduce quickly to half glaze, thickening it with a few tablespoonfuls of tomato sauce, keeping it quite light. Pour a little of the sauce over the leg, put the remainder in a sauceboat, garnish with potato croquettes and Brussels sprouts in piles, and serve hot. Leg of Mutton, Provincial Style Take two or three each of cloves of garlic and anchovies cut into fillets, and lard a leg of mutton with them. Roast the mutton in a quick oven, keeping it well basted. Boil one or two more cloves of garlic, changing the water often, and when nearly done, drain and refresh them with cold water. Drain again, put into a stewpan with one breakfast cupful each of stock and gravy, and boil until reduced to a thick creamy consistency. When cooked place the mutton on a hot dish, pour the sauce around it, garnish with vegetables, and serve.
Three related treatments of a leg of mutton, written for a coal range and a cook who already knew what a braise looked like. The core method translates cleanly to a covered pot in a low oven; the meat itself is the hard part to source.
- Mutton, and what to buy insteadMutton is sheep over two years old — strong, fatty, and slow to tenderize. Most butchers now sell only lamb; a whole leg of lamb runs 6-8 lb and will be done appreciably faster than the time given here. If you can find hogget or true mutton from a halal or specialty butcher, it is much closer to what Oscar meant, and the long braise is there for a reason.
- Gills and wineglassfulsA gill is half a cup, so three gills of gravy is 1½ cups. A wineglassful in this period is about 2 fl oz, not the 6 oz a modern glass holds — so roughly ¼ cup each of white wine and broth to start the Milanese braise, topped up as it cooks.
- Hot ashes on the coverBanking embers on the lid gave heat from above as well as below — an improvised even oven. The modern equivalent is a heavy covered pot in a 300-325F oven. "Cook slowly until done" for a bone-in mutton leg means 3-4 hours; check for a fork sliding in with no resistance rather than a clock.
- "A quick oven"In the Provincial recipe, quick means a hot oven — period tables put it somewhere in the region of 400-450F. For a leg of lamb that is a hard sear-and-roast; drop to 350F after the first 20 minutes if the surface is colouring faster than the interior cooks.
- Glaze and half glazeTo "glaze" the meat is to brush it with reduced, syrupy stock and flash it under high heat until it shines. "Half glaze" is the same word as demi-glace, used loosely: the strained, defatted braising liquor boiled down until it coats a spoon. Skim the fat before reducing, not after, or the sauce turns greasy.
- The boning, and why the shape mattersOscar's insistence on tunnel-boning from the ends rather than butterflying is not fussiness. An intact skin makes a sealed pocket that holds the stuffing's juices through four hours of braising. A butchered-open leg rolled and tied works, but it leaks, and the cold meat does dry out as he warns.
- The stuffing needs cooking throughBreadcrumbs bound with raw egg, bacon, ham and mushrooms sit at the centre of a large piece of meat. Four hours at braising heat handles it, but if you are working with a smaller lamb leg and a shorter cook, check that the centre of the stuffing reaches 165F.
- Larding with garlic and anchovyCut slivers, pierce the meat with a thin knife along the grain, and push them in — the anchovy dissolves entirely and reads as savoury depth, not fish. Boiling the extra garlic in several changes of water strips its harshness so it can be reduced into a mild cream.
- YieldA bone-in leg should serve around 8-10; the boned and stuffed version, cut in rectangular slices, will stretch further, and the recipe itself notes the meat stays moist when cold.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, not its stoves, but his 1896 book is a fair record of what a large American hotel kitchen of the 1890s was expected to produce — which was, overwhelmingly, French technique applied to whatever the market offered. Mutton was still ordinary meat in that market; the shift to lamb as the default came later, as sheep breeding turned toward earlier slaughter and American tastes moved away from strong flavours. In the Milanese recipe Oscar records a regional Italian dish along with regional opinion about it, including the Roman and Neapolitan complaint of a "woolly" flavour — a real objection to older sheep, and the reason garlic, anchovy, wine and tomato turn up so persistently in Mediterranean mutton cookery. The instruction to bank hot ashes on the lid belongs to a much older tradition of French braising practice.