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Roast Saddle of Mutton
Remove all the fat and skin from a saddle of mutton, chop off the ends of the ribs and take out the cords and veins along the back. Wipe dry with a cloth and rub well inside with salt. Roll the flank under on each side, tie it three or four times across the middle, sprinkle well with flour, salt and pepper and put it in a baking dish with the inside upward so that the fat will be thoroughly cooked. Cover over it a piece of paper well buttered and cook until the fat is brown and crisp and the meat well done. Place on a dish, and serve. Roasted Saddle of Mutton with Chestnut Puree Trim both fillets of a saddle of mutton, lard, fix in a roastingpan and cook in a hot oven, basting constantly, roast for about three-quarters of an hour, remove, sprinkle some salt over and cut the fillets in slices in a slanting direction, letting them adhere to a small part of the fat. Cut off the sides of the saddle, place them on a removing dish, forming with them a kind of support on which arrange the carved fillets of the saddle. Serve it with a separate dish of chestnut puree and a sauceboatful of melted half glaze. Boned Shoulder of Mutton, Prince of Wales Style.
Bone a shoulder of mutton and lay it on a deep dish, sprinkle over one teaspoonful each of bruised cloves, cardamoms, allspice, coriander seeds and long peppers; baste it with a breakfast cupful of common claret and one-half breakfast cupful of white wine vinegar, and two or three tablespoonfuls of salad oil. Leave the shoulder in the pickle for twenty-four hours. Put the bone and trimmings in a saucepan with two quarts of white stock and stew gently over a slow fire for several hours until all the goodness is extracted. Reduce the stock to about half its former quantity, strain into a basin, and when cold skim off all the fat. When sufficiently pickled drain the meat, roll, fasten with a skewer, put it in a saucepan with a few pieces of carrot, turnip and leek and four or five dried mushrooms, pour the stock of the bones over the meat and cook slowly until tender. When done drain the meat, place it on a hot dish, strain its cooking liquor into a small saucepan, soak one-fourth ounce of gelatine in red wine, stir it into the meat and boil until reduced to a half glaze. Cut some boiled carrots and turnips into rings, fry them in butter, sprinkle over some chopped parsley, arrange in alternate order round the meat, pour the glaze over the shoulder, and serve.
Three related mutton preparations run together in one entry, in the compressed style of a professional kitchen where the reader was assumed to know the trade. A few terms and quantities need translating before any of them can be followed.
- What a saddle isThe saddle is the whole unsplit loin from both sides of the animal, cut across the back; a lamb saddle typically runs around 6-10 lb and a mutton one heavier. Few butchers stock one, so it will usually have to be ordered, and lamb is likely to be substituted for mutton.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is sheep over about two years old, with dark, firm, strongly flavoured meat that stands up to the clove-and-coriander pickle in the third recipe. Nearly all sheep sold in the United States now is lamb under a year, which is milder and cooks faster; expect a considerably tamer dish.
- Oven temperaturesThe second recipe calls for a 'hot oven' without defining it; in practice that is taken as something in the region of 425-450F. The first roast, larger and untrimmed of its fat cap, is better started hot and finished around 350F; the trimmed and larded fillets of the second are meant to go fast and hot for the stated three-quarters of an hour.
- "Well done"The first recipe asks for the meat well done. Modern practice takes leg and saddle to about 130-135F internal for medium-rare and rests it, which is the difference between sliceable meat and grey meat. Three-quarters of an hour at high heat, as the second recipe directs, will in fact leave a trimmed saddle pink at the centre.
- The buttered paperThis is a paper cartouche laid over the joint to keep the surface from scorching while the fat renders. Parchment does the job; foil traps steam and will stop the fat crisping, which is the point of the whole method.
- LardingTo lard is to thread strips of chilled pork back fat through the lean with a larding needle, necessary because trimmed fillets have no fat of their own. Barding, tying a thin sheet of fat or bacon over the surface, is the practical substitute.
- Pickle quantities and safetyA "breakfast cupful" is roughly 8-10 fl oz. Long peppers are the elongated relative of black pepper, available from spice merchants; use black pepper if unavailable. The twenty-four-hour marinade must be done in the refrigerator, not at room temperature as a 1900 larder allowed.
- Half glazeDemi-glace: the strained braising liquor reduced until it coats a spoon. The line "stir it into the meat" appears to be an error for stirring the soaked gelatine into the liquor. A quarter ounce of gelatine is about one packet, and a properly reduced stock made with bones will need none at all.
- YieldNo yields are given; a saddle of this size would serve roughly 8-10 and the boned shoulder roughly 6-8. The chestnut puree is left to the reader: cooked peeled chestnuts pushed through a sieve with butter, cream and a little of the stock.
Saddle of mutton was the great English joint of the nineteenth century, the centrepiece a club or hotel carved in the room, and its presence in Oscar Tschirky's book marks how thoroughly the Waldorf's kitchen in the 1890s was working in the Anglo-French idiom rather than an American one. The third recipe's name is worth pausing over: "Prince of Wales style" almost certainly nods to Albert Edward, later Edward VII, whose appetite and whose name were attached to a great many dishes in the period whether or not he ever ate them, and the heavily spiced claret pickle it calls for—cloves, cardamom, coriander, long pepper—belongs to an older English tradition of marinating strong-flavoured mutton before braising. Long pepper itself is a survival from medieval European cookery, largely displaced by black pepper by the eighteenth century and here hanging on in a grand hotel kitchen. Mutton's disappearance from American menus over the following half-century, as sheep were slaughtered younger and lamb became the standard, is the reason a dish this familiar to Oscar's diners now reads as an antique.