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Stewed Shoulder of Mutton
Put a boned shoulder of mutton into a saucepan with a little broth, parsley, cloves, bay leaf, a small clove of garlic, a few carrots, turnips and onions, and salt and pepper to taste, and stew gently until thoroughly cooked. Remove, drain well, place it on a baking dish, pour over a little thick gravy, sprinkle with breadcrumbs. Mix the yolks of three eggs in a basin with a little oiled butter, spread it over the mutton, and cover again with breadcrumbs. Place it in a hot oven to brown, basting frequently with hot butter. Remove to a dish and serve with a little of the gravy strained and reduced.
Mutton Steak, Florentine Style Cut the meat off a leg of mutton in thick slices, rub each slice over with salt, pepper and grated nutmeg on both sides. Season some breadcrumbs with thyme, savory, cloves, mace, salt and pepper, and bind them with beaten yolks of eggs, then divide and mould the mixture into small balls; butter the edges of a pie-dish, line them with paste, and put in the slices of mutton, together with the balls, four chopped shallots, a little powdered sweet herbs, and two or three anchovies. Moisten with one-half pint each of claret and water, and put on top one-half pound of butter, broken in small pieces. Cover with puff paste, and trim around the edges, moistening and pressing them together. Bake in a hot oven, and serve while hot.
Two recipes run together here: a stewed shoulder finished as a gratin, and a mutton pie in the old English manner. Both assume mutton, a long-simmering meat that has largely left American butcher counters.
- Mutton vs. lambMutton is sheep over a year old, with dense meat and a strong fat. A boned lamb shoulder of 3-4 lb behaves similarly but will be tender in about half the time, so start checking the stew at 90 minutes rather than braising blindly for three hours.
- "Oiled butter"In period usage this generally means butter melted until it separates, the clear fat poured off from the milky solids, which comes to much the same thing as clarified butter.
- Hot ovenProbably somewhere in the region of 425-450F, though the book gives no temperatures. The shoulder is already cooked through; the oven is only setting the yolk-and-butter coat and browning the crumbs, likely 15-20 minutes with two or three bastings.
- The hinge: drain and dry the meatIf the shoulder goes onto the baking dish wet from the pot, neither crumb layer will adhere and the yolk coating slides off. Drain it, blot it, and let it cool for ten minutes before crumbing.
- Reducing the gravyStrain the braising liquid, skim the considerable mutton fat, then reduce hard. The vegetables and cloves have given it plenty of body and no thickener is wanted.
- "Paste" and "puff paste"Paste is a plain short pastry for the lining; puff paste is the laminated dough for the lid. Store-bought all-butter puff pastry works for the top, but line the dish with shortcrust — puff on the bottom of a wet pie collapses.
- Half a pound of butterDotted over a single pie this is by the standards of 1896 a lubricant, not an error, but it will pool. A quarter pound gives a pie that eats better without drying the meat.
- The anchoviesTwo or three salted anchovies in a claret-based meat pie are seasoning, not flavor you will taste as fish. They dissolve into the gravy and read as depth. Do not leave them out.
- YieldThe stewed shoulder serves 6-8. The pie, in a 9-inch deep dish, serves 6.
Oscar Tschirky, mai tre d'ho tel at the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, compiled his 1896 cook book largely from the professional French repertoire of the hotel kitchen, and these two mutton dishes show its older English substratum. "Florentine style" here has nothing to do with spinach or with Florence in the modern menu sense: in English cookery from the seventeenth century onward a "florentine" was a meat or fruit mixture baked in a dish under a pastry lid, and mutton florentines seasoned with mace, cloves, shallot, claret and anchovy appear in that form well before Oscar. The stewed shoulder, braised and then breadcrumbed and browned, is the French technique of finishing a boiled joint en gratin so that a cheap cut leaves the kitchen looking like a roast. Both recipes assume a meat that has since vanished from American markets: mutton was ordinary eating in 1896, and the word later became something closer to an insult, a shift often attributed to the quantities of tinned and boiled mutton served to soldiers in both wars, though that explanation is more folk tradition than established fact.