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Breast of Mutton Braise, Nivernaise
Cut a tender breast of mutton into two-inch-square pieces. Thoroughly heat two tablespoons lard in a braising pan, add the mutton and brown fifteen minutes, turning the pieces with fork once in a while, then drain off fat and add a tablespoon butter with twelve new, scraped carrots and brown five minutes longer, lightly mixing; sprinkle with a tablespoon flour. Stir well, moisten with a gill claret, a gill broth, a gill demi-glace, a gill tomato juice, and season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Tie in a bunch one leek, two branches celery, two branches parsley, one branch chervil, one bay leaf, a sprig thyme, two cloves, a bean garlic, and add to the pan. Mix well, let boil for ten minutes, cover pan and set in oven fifty-five minutes, remove, pick up mutton and carrots with a skimmer, and dress them on a dish. Boil sauce for ten minutes, strain over mutton, sprinkle a little freshly chopped parsley over and serve.
A classic French braise scaled for a cut that has largely left the butcher's case. The recipe assumes a stocked professional kitchen, so a few substitutions and one temperature are needed before you start.
- GillA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). The four gills of claret, broth, demi-glace and tomato juice come to 2 cups of liquid in total, which is about right to come halfway up the meat.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A covered braise of this kind is best at about 325F; the 55 minutes stated may be enough for two-inch pieces, but tough mutton breast can want an hour and a half or more, so test rather than trust the clock.
- Breast of muttonMutton means mature sheep, generally over a year old and often considerably older, strongly flavoured and sinewy. Lamb breast, sold as breast or as riblets, is the practical substitute; it is very fatty and bony, so buy 3 to 3½ lb for four people.
- Demi-glaceIn a professional kitchen of this period it was a standing item: brown sauce reduced with stock until it coats a spoon. A good reduced veal or beef stock, or a spoonful of commercial demi-glace concentrate loosened with water, does the same job of giving the sauce body.
- Bean garlicAlmost certainly rendering the French gousse d'ail, gousse being a pod or husk; here it means a clove of garlic. Leave it in the bundle unpeeled and it will be discarded with the herbs. Chervil is worth seeking out but parsley plus a little tarragon substitutes.
- New, scraped carrotsYoung spring carrots, thin enough to cook whole in the braise. With supermarket carrots, cut them into 2-inch batons and add them for only the last 40 minutes, or they will collapse into the sauce.
- Degreasing the sauceThe instruction to drain off the lard after browning matters, but breast renders a great deal more fat during the braise. After lifting out the meat and carrots, let the liquid settle and skim thoroughly before the final ten-minute boil, or the strained sauce will be greasy.
- YieldServes four as written, with the carrots as the only vegetable. Boiled or steamed potatoes suit it well and soak up the sauce.
Nivernaise points to the Nivernais, the old province around Nevers in central France, long known for its carrots; in classical French cookery the name signals a garnish of glazed young carrots, sometimes with small onions, and it attaches to braised beef and mutton more often than anything else. The recipe appears to belong to a book that gathered dishes from professional European kitchens for an American readership, which would explain the casual call for a gill of demi-glace: the compiler assumed a cook with brown sauce already on the stove. Breast of mutton was the cheap end of a sheep then widely eaten in Britain and America, and this treatment, long browning followed by a slow moist cook with wine and a tied bouquet, is the standard method for making a bony, fatty cut worth serving. Mutton itself gradually fell out of American favour over the course of the twentieth century, and the same braise is now nearly always made with lamb.