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Mutton a La Venison
Mrs. J. B. L Take a leg of mutton and lard it well with strips of salt pork inserted in deep slits in the meat, which has been previously rolled in pepper and cloves ; bake two hours or according to the size of the roast, basting frequently while in the oven; about an hour before serving, spread over it currant jelly, return to the oven and let it brown.
A nineteenth-century roast that borrows venison's treatment — larding with fat, spicing with cloves, finishing with currant jelly — to flatter mutton. The original assumes you know your oven and your butcher; here is what it leaves out.
- Mutton, and what to use insteadMutton is sheep past its first or second year, strongly flavoured. Most butchers now sell only lamb; a bone-in leg of lamb of 5-7 lb behaves similarly but cooks faster and needs less help from the pork.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A roast of this kind belongs at 325-350F throughout, or start at 425F for 20 minutes to colour the surface and drop to 325F for the remainder.
- Two hours is a guide, not a ruleCook to internal temperature rather than the clock: 130-135F at the thickest part for pink lamb, 145-150F for mutton, which is better slightly further along. A 6 lb leg at 325F will take roughly 1.5 to 2 hours.
- Move the jelly to the endAn hour of currant jelly in the oven risks scorching and bitterness. Spread it over the roast in the last 20-30 minutes, or brush it on in two coats over the final 15 minutes.
- LardingCut salt pork into strips about the thickness of a pencil, chill them firm, and push them into slits made with a narrow knife, running with the grain and spaced a couple of inches apart. Very salty pork should be rinsed first, or the finished meat will be over-seasoned.
- Pepper and clovesWhole cloves are punishing in a roast; use ground cloves sparingly, no more than half a teaspoon for a whole leg, mixed with a tablespoon of coarse pepper and salt.
- Basting and panRoast on a rack in a shallow pan with a little water or stock beneath so the drippings do not burn. Baste every 20 minutes or so with the pan fat.
- Resting and yieldRest the roast 15-20 minutes under loose foil before carving. A leg of this size serves eight to ten, with the pan juices deglazed and any remaining jelly stirred in for sauce.
"A la venison" is a nineteenth-century kitchen conceit: dressing domestic meat in the manner of game. Venison is lean and dry, so cooks larded it with pork fat and served it with a sharp-sweet jelly to cut the richness; mutton, likewise lean and assertive, took the same treatment and borrowed the name. Currant jelly with roast meat was standard in Anglo-American cooking of the period, and cloves belong to the older tradition, going back to medieval and early modern spicing of large joints. The recipe's attribution to "Mrs. J. B. L." is typical of the community cookbook format — compilations of contributions from named subscribers, often got up as charity fundraisers — a format that produced practical, terse, unmeasured instructions written cook to cook. Mutton was ordinary household meat then and has since all but vanished from North American butchers, which is why the dish now reads as exotic and did not at the time.