Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Boiled Leg of Mutton
Boiled Leg of Mutton
Mrs. G. Brown, Boil well in clear water until tender, seasoning the water with salt; serve with egg sauce, and garnish with parsley, sliced lemons, or some sour jelly.
Four lines of instruction assume a cook who already knows how a leg of mutton behaves in a pot. The gaps worth filling are the meat itself, the water temperature, and the sauce that is named but not explained.
- Mutton, and what to use insteadMutton is sheep over two years old — deeper flavoured, coarser grained, and largely absent from North American retail. A 5–6 lb bone-in leg of lamb is the practical substitute; if you find true mutton at a halal or specialty butcher, expect to add 30–45 minutes.
- "Boil well" means a bare simmerThis is the hinge. At a rolling boil the outside of the leg shreds and squeezes out while the centre is still tough. Bring the pot up, skim the grey foam, then hold it at 180–190F where the surface only shivers.
- TimingRoughly 20 minutes per pound after the water comes up, so about 2 hours for a 6 lb lamb leg, longer if it is slow to yield. Tender means a skewer slides into the thickest part with no resistance and the meat has begun to shrink from the shank bone.
- Salting the waterSalt the water — about 1 tablespoon per 4 quarts. Mrs. Brown seasons the water with salt and nothing else; a halved onion, a carrot, a bay leaf and a few peppercorns are a common addition to a boiled joint, but they go beyond what this entry calls for.
- Egg sauceNot custard. It is a plain white sauce — 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 1/2 cups milk or strained cooking liquid — with two or three coarsely chopped hard-boiled eggs stirred in at the end, seasoned with salt, pepper and a little of the cooking broth to thin it.
- "Some sour jelly"Red currant jelly is the usual reading; a sharp crab-apple or gooseberry jelly does the same work. The point is acid against fatty meat, which is also why capers or a squeeze of lemon are the traditional alternatives.
- Resting and carvingLift the leg out, let it sit 15 minutes under foil, then carve in slices across the grain. Save the broth — it is good stock, and reheating leftover slices in it keeps them from drying.
- YieldA 6 lb leg serves 8 generously, with enough left for cold slices or a hash the next day.
Boiled leg of mutton with a white sauce was a fixture of British and Anglo-Canadian dinner tables through the nineteenth century, when sheep were kept as much for wool and long-lived flocks as for tender young lamb — older, stronger meat rewarded long moist cooking far more than roasting. Caper sauce was the classic partner in English cookery, and egg sauce, as here, appears as an alternative in household books of the period. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from recipes contributed by named local women and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children. Mrs. G. Brown seems to have assumed readers who had boiled a joint before and needed only her preferences on the sauce and the garnish; the brevity reads as shorthand rather than carelessness.