Home › Meats › Boiled Mutton with Caper Sauce
Boiled Mutton with Caper Sauce
Have ready a pot of boiling water, and throw in a handful of salt; wash a leg of mutton and rub salt through it. If it is to be rare, cook about two hours; if well done, three hours or longer, according to size. Boil a pint of milk, thicken with flour well blended, add butter, salt, pepper and two table-spoons of capers, or mint sauce if preferred. - Mrs. E. L. F.
A plain nineteenth-century boiled joint with a flour-thickened caper sauce. Two things need attention: the water should never actually boil, and mutton itself has all but disappeared from retail butchery.
- Mutton, and what to use insteadMutton is sheep over two years old, darker and far stronger-flavoured than lamb, and it is a special-order item from a butcher in most places now. A 5-6 lb leg of lamb behaves similarly but cooks faster and tastes milder; hogget, if you can find it, is the closest substitute.
- Do not let it boilDespite the title, a rolling boil will squeeze and toughen the leg. Bring the pot to the boil, add the meat, then drop the heat so the surface only shivers, around 180-190F. Period directions that speak of a pot "boiling gently" at the back of the range may well describe something close to this, though the wording here is simply "boiling water."
- The timingsTwo to three hours reflects a large, tough mutton leg on an unreliable range. A 5-6 lb lamb leg needs roughly 1 1/2 to 2 hours at a bare simmer. Judge by a thermometer at the thickest point away from bone rather than by the clock.
- "Rare" is not rareNothing simmered for two hours comes out pink in the modern sense. The distinction Mrs. F. seems to be drawing is between just-cooked and falling-apart. For the former, pull the joint at about 145F internal and rest it 15 minutes; for the latter, carry on until a skewer meets no resistance.
- Salting the meat"Rub salt through it" means rubbing salt into the surface and into the cuts around the bone. The handful thrown into the pot is a loose measure; the meat takes up very little of it during a simmer.
- The sauce proportionsA pint of milk is 16 fl oz in an American book of this period. For a proper velvety sauce use about 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour cooked together, then the milk whisked in gradually and simmered several minutes to lose the raw flour taste. "Thicken with flour well blended" means blended smooth with liquid or butter first, not shaken in dry.
- CapersDrain and rinse brined capers before adding, and add them at the end off the heat so they keep their bite. Season the sauce after the capers go in, since they carry a good deal of salt themselves.
- Mint sauce is not an alternative sauce hereMint sauce in this era is chopped mint steeped in vinegar and sugar, served cold and thin. Most likely it replaces the whole white sauce rather than being stirred into it, though the wording leaves room for it standing in only for the capers.
- Yield and the pot liquorA leg of this size serves roughly six to eight, more from a large mutton leg. The cooking liquid is a light, salty broth worth keeping for a barley soup, though it will need diluting.
Boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce is one of the fixed points of English cookery, carried into American books like The Dixie Cook Book (1883) largely intact. Vinegar in some form has been served with mutton for centuries, whether as caper sauce, mint sauce, or plain onion sauce sharpened with a little acid; capers were the imported article, with pickled nasturtium seeds or broom buds serving as the cheaper domestic stand-ins. Boiling suited a large joint on a wood or coal range, where a covered pot at the back needed less tending than a spit or an oven. The signed attribution, "Mrs. E. L. F.," is typical of the book's method: it was compiled from contributions by named and initialled housekeepers, so the instructions assume a cook who already knows what a gentle boil looks like and needs only the proportions and the timing.