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Roasted Fore Quarter of Mutton
Select a young fore quarter of mutton, wrap it up in sheets of well buttered paper, and put it on the spit in front of a clear fire to roast; when done place it on a dish over a puree of white beans, and serve very hot.
Four sentences of instruction that assume an open hearth, a spit and a butcher who will sell you a quarter of an animal. The technique translates to an oven without much loss, but the cut and the scale need thinking about.
- What a fore quarter isThe front section of the carcass: shoulder, neck, breast and the fore ribs, on the bone, and a very large joint by modern standards. No supermarket sells it. A whole bone-in lamb shoulder of 5-6 lb is the closest practical stand-in and behaves the same way.
- Mutton is not lambMutton is sheep over about two years old, with darker meat and a stronger, fattier flavour. It has largely vanished from Anglo-American butchery but is still sold by halal butchers and some farm suppliers. Hogget, at one to two years, sits between the two.
- The buttered paperThis is the hinge of the recipe. The paper is a heat shield and a baste in one: it keeps the exterior from scorching in front of a radiant fire while the joint cooks through. In an oven the equivalent is a loose foil tent over the top for the first two-thirds of the cooking, removed at the end to colour the fat.
- Oven in place of spitStart at 450F for 20 minutes to set the surface, then drop to 325F for the balance. A bone-in shoulder wants roughly 25-30 minutes per pound at the lower temperature; go by a thermometer, not the clock.
- DonenessShoulder is a working muscle full of connective tissue and is poor at 135F. Take it to 175-185F in the thickest part, where the collagen has broken down and the meat pulls from the bone.
- RestingTwenty minutes under loose foil before carving. A large joint carved straight from the oven will lose its juices onto the dish.
- The bean pureeDried haricot, cannellini or flageolet, soaked overnight, simmered soft with an onion, a carrot and a bay leaf, then passed through a food mill or blended with some of the cooking liquor and finished with butter. It is meant to be loose enough to spread on the platter and catch the roasting juices, not stiff.
- YieldA 5-6 lb shoulder serves eight generously; an actual fore quarter served a banquet table and is a two-person lift.
Oscar Tschirky's book collects the working repertoire of the Waldorf kitchen in the 1890s, when hotel cooking still ran on French classical lines and mutton was a respectable centrepiece rather than a curiosity. Roasting large joints in buttered or oiled paper in front of an open fire is a much older English and French practice than the book itself, and the paper is the direct ancestor of the foil tent. The bed of white bean puree marks this as a formal service rather than a plain roast: haricots and mutton are a standing pairing in French cookery, seen most familiarly in gigot with flageolets and in cassoulet. That the recipe gives no weight, no time and no temperature is characteristic of the genre, since it was written for professionals who judged a fire by looking at it and a joint by feel.