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Spiced Shoulder of Mutton
Bone a shoulder of mutton, and rub it well with a mixture of two ounces of sugar, one teaspoonful each of ground mace and pepper, and one saltspoonful of powdered cloves. Continue to do this for a week, letting it remain in the pickle; then roll it up, tie it round with a string, place in a stewpan with some good beef broth and cook slowly until done. Lay it on a dish, add a little piquant sauce to the broth, and serve.
This is a spiced-and-collared joint of the old English type, and the problem is the week that precedes the cooking. As printed, the method is a cure with no curing agent.
- The pickle contains no saltTwo ounces of sugar, mace, pepper and cloves rubbed over a boned shoulder is a seasoning, not a preservative. Two ounces of sugar spread over a joint of that size is far too little to lower water activity meaningfully or to inhibit bacterial growth, so the meat is simply raw mutton left standing for seven days.
- No temperature is given, and that is the hingeA nineteenth-century larder ran cold and drafty; a modern kitchen counter does not. Between roughly 40F and 140F, Staphylococcus aureus on the surface of handled meat produces a heat-stable toxin that later slow cooking will not destroy. Clostridium species are a further concern in a rolled and tied joint, where the interior is sealed away from air.
- Rolling compounds the riskBoning and rolling moves surface bacteria into the centre of the meat, which is the slowest part to heat. Traditional collared meats relied on a heavy brine, usually with saltpetre, to control that; this recipe relies on nothing.
- "Cook slowly until done" is not a standardThere is no time, no temperature and no doneness cue. Even setting the week-long hold aside, the instruction gives no way to confirm the centre of a rolled joint has reached a safe temperature.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for spiced or collared mutton or beef that specifies salt and cure quantities by weight, a refrigerated curing temperature, and a finished internal temperature.
- Reading the originalA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon. A stewpan is a wide, straight-sided pan with a lid, closer to a modern braiser than a stockpot. "Piquant sauce" conventionally meant a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar, shallots and chopped gherkin or capers; here a little of it is stirred into the cooking broth at the end, which implies the sauce itself was made separately.
Spiced and collared joints belong to a long English tradition of treating meat with sugar, sweet spice and salt before boiling it and serving it either hot in its broth or pressed and cold in slices. Mace and cloves on mutton point back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when sweet spicing of meat was ordinary rather than festive, and the survival of the method into a 1896 American hotel book is a reminder that Oscar Tschirky's repertoire seems to have included at least some inherited English cookery sitting alongside the French dishes the Waldorf was better known for. What has dropped out of this version is the salt: earlier printed recipes for spiced mutton and spiced beef commonly call for a substantial quantity of common salt, and often saltpetre as well, over the week of rubbing. Whether the omission here is an abridgement, a compositor's slip, or an assumption that any cook would know to add it, the text as it stands describes a cure that cannot cure.