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Leg of Mutton a La Venison
Remove all rough fat from a leg of mutton, lay in a deep earthen dish, and rub into the meat very thoroughly the following mixture: One table-spoon salt, one each of celery, salt, brown sugar, black pepper, made mustard, allspice, and sweet herbs mixed and powdered. After these have been rubbed into all parts of meat, pour over it slowly a tea-cup good vinegar, cover tightly and set in a cool place for four or five days, turning ham, and basting it with liquid three or four times a day. To cook, leave in a clean kettle a quart boiling water, have in kettle an inverted tin-pan or rack made for the purpose; on it lay ham just as taken out of pickle; cover kettle tightly, and stew for four hours. Do not allow water to touch the meat. Add a tea-cup of hot water to the pickle, and baste the ham with it. When ready to serve, thicken the liquid in the kettle with flour, strain through a fine strainer, and serve the meat with it and a relish of currant jelly.
A four-to-five day vinegar and spice marinade meant to give mutton the dark, gamey character of venison, followed by four hours of steaming over water rather than in it. Two things need attention before you start: where the meat sits during those five days, and the fact that the recipe switches from calling it a leg of mutton to calling it a ham.
- The "cool place" is now the refrigeratorFive days of daily basting and turning was manageable in a springhouse or cold cellar, which ran considerably colder than a kitchen though not reliably as cold as a modern refrigerator; keep it at 40F or below today. Do not attempt it at room temperature. Use a non-reactive dish -- glass, glazed earthenware or stainless -- since the vinegar will pit aluminium and cast iron.
- "Ham" means the legMid-word the recipe starts calling the joint a ham. In nineteenth-century usage a ham is simply the hind leg of any animal, cured or not. It is the same piece of mutton throughout; nothing pork enters the dish.
- The spice list has a stray comma"One each of celery, salt, brown sugar" most likely means celery salt. Read it as one tablespoon each of celery salt, brown sugar, black pepper, made mustard, allspice and mixed powdered sweet herbs, plus the tablespoon of salt at the head of the list: seven tablespoons of seasoning in all.
- TeacupA period teacup is not a modern measuring cup; sources put it anywhere from about 4 to 6 fl oz. Use a sharp cider or malt vinegar rather than distilled white.
- Mutton is not lambMutton is sheep over two years old -- stronger, leaner, tougher, and the whole point of the recipe, since its flavour is what stands in for venison. If you can only get lamb, a leg of hogget or an older lamb comes closest; a supermarket spring lamb leg will be overwhelmed by seven tablespoons of spice and will not need anything like four hours.
- It is steamed, not boiledThe inverted tin pan is an improvised steamer rack. A quart of water in a covered stockpot will boil away long before four hours, so check every forty minutes and top up with boiling water, keeping the level below the rack.
- Judge by temperature, not the clockFour hours suits a 6-8 lb mutton leg cooked to the falling-apart stage the period preferred. Modern cooks who want it sliceable should take it to at least 145F at the thickest point and let it rest; for the original texture, take it well past 175F so the connective tissue breaks down.
- The basting liquid must be boiledThe pickle has been in contact with raw meat for days. It is used to baste meat that goes on cooking for hours, which is fine, but anything left over that ends up in the sauce should be brought to a full boil first. Skim the fat before thickening with flour.
- Browning and yieldSteaming leaves the outside grey. Fifteen minutes in a 450F oven after it comes off the rack will give it colour. A leg of this size serves eight to ten, with currant jelly on the side as the recipe directs.
Dressing mutton "a la venison" was a standard trick of English and American kitchens long before The Dixie Cook Book printed this version in the 1880s: venison was scarce, seasonal and expensive, while mutton was cheap and, from a mature animal, strong enough in flavour to take the disguise. The spiced vinegar marinade does the work, darkening the meat and lending it the sharp, slightly high note that hung game was expected to have, and the currant jelly at the end is the giveaway -- it was the near-obligatory accompaniment to venison on both sides of the Atlantic. The steaming method, with the joint held above the water on an inverted pan, reflects a period conviction that boiling washed the goodness out of meat; cookbooks of the era return again and again to the idea of cooking a large joint in its own steam and building the gravy from what drips down. That mutton needed such an elaborate rescue also says something about American tastes after the Civil War, when sheep were kept more for wool than for the table and mutton was steadily losing ground to beef and pork.