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Boiled Leg of Mutton, Caper Sauce
Procure a tender six-pound leg of mutton. Gently pound the meat with a cleaver, place in a large saucepan, cover with cold water, add two sliced carrots, one sliced turnip, two sliced onions, one sliced leek, two branches celery, two bay leaves, one sprig thyme, two cloves, one bean sound garlic, one heavy tablespoon salt and a teaspoon pepper. Cover the pan and let boil for one hour and ten minutes. Remove the leg, dress on a hot dish and serve with a caper sauce separately.
A plain boiled joint of the old English school, filtered through a French-trained hotel kitchen. Two things carry it: the pot must never actually boil, and the caper sauce the recipe declines to describe is half the dish.
- Do not boil itDespite the wording, hold the water at a bare shiver, around 180F, with the surface barely moving. A rolling boil at that length squeezes the muscle fibres and gives you grey, stringy meat surrounded by good broth.
- "One bean sound garlic"A single sound clove of garlic, unpeeled or peeled as you like. "Bean" here probably reflects the French gousse, which means a pod or husk rather than a bean, and "sound" simply means not sprouted or soft.
- Mutton is not lambMutton means sheep over about two years old, with darker, firmer, far stronger-tasting meat. It is sold now mainly by halal butchers and specialist farms. A 6 lb leg of lamb substitutes directly but is milder, and being more tender wants the shorter end of the timing.
- Timing and donenessSeventy minutes for six pounds is roughly twelve minutes to the pound, which lands a lamb leg pink at the bone. Genuine mutton usually wants longer, an hour and three quarters to two hours, to give the connective tissue time. Check the thickest part rather than the clock: 130-135F for pink, 145F for medium.
- The poundingTapping the joint with the flat of a cleaver was a way of loosening dense old mutton before cooking. On modern lamb it does nothing worth doing and can burst the surface. Skip it.
- Caper sauceThe period standard is a white sauce made with some of the cooking liquor: roux of 2 tablespoons each butter and flour, loosened with about 2 cups of the strained, skimmed broth, simmered until it coats a spoon, then finished off the heat with 3-4 tablespoons drained capers, a squeeze of lemon and a knob of butter. Add the capers last so they keep their bite.
- Skim, and keep the pot liquorSkim the grey scum as it rises in the first ten minutes or the broth turns cloudy and muddy-tasting. What remains after the sauce is a strong mutton stock, good for barley soup the next day.
- Rest before carvingFifteen minutes under loose foil on a warmed dish. A boiled joint sheds a great deal of liquid if cut straight from the pot.
- YieldA 6 lb bone-in leg serves six to eight, usually with some left to eat cold.
Boiled mutton with caper sauce was one of the fixed points of the Victorian and Edwardian English table, the sort of dish Mrs Beeton set down and that clubs and boarding houses served regularly. The capers, pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa shipped from the Mediterranean, do the job that mint sauce does for roast lamb: a sharp, briny counterweight to a fatty, strongly flavoured meat. Filippini and his contemporaries were writing for American hotel and household cooks at a time when a large boiled joint was still the economical centrepiece, giving both the meat and the broth for the next day's soup from one fire. Mutton itself has since largely vanished from English-speaking markets, pushed out by younger, milder lamb, so a dish that once needed no explanation now reads as a period piece.