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Cold Mutton, Mayonnaise
Cut all the meat of the mutton left over from yesterday into very thin slices. Dress them on a cold dish, arrange twelve lettuce leaves and a few vinegar pickles around. Sprinkle a little chopped jelly around and serve with a mayonnaise sauce separately.
N.B. Left over roast lamb can be utilised in the same way.
A composed cold plate rather than a cooked dish, and it lives or dies on how thin the meat is sliced. Everything else is arrangement.
- The hinge: slice thin and coldCold mutton and lamb are tough and greasy when cut thick. Chill the joint thoroughly, use a long sharp knife, and cut across the grain as close to translucent as you can manage.
- MuttonMutton means sheep over about two years old, strongly flavoured and now rare outside halal butchers and specialist suppliers. The note at the end is the practical answer: leftover roast leg or shoulder of lamb behaves the same way.
- "Chopped jelly"This is the set meat jelly from beneath the roast drippings, or a savoury aspic, chilled firm and chopped fine so it glitters on the plate. Skim off the fat cap first; if there is no jelly, a spoonful of chopped parsley or a few capers gives the same visual break.
- Vinegar picklesSharp pickled vegetables in vinegar. Small pickled cucumbers (cornichons or gherkins) suit well, though the term could equally cover pickled onions or walnuts; not sweet bread-and-butter slices. Their acid is doing the work of a dressing on the meat.
- Mayonnaise served separatelyMayonnaise for a cold meat platter was generally made stiff, and many period recipes include mustard. Send it in a bowl as directed rather than spooning it over; the meat weeps a little as it sits and thinned mayonnaise looks poor.
- Yield and servingDepends entirely on what came off the joint; the twelve lettuce leaves are a garnish count and no firm guide to the number served. Serve with brown bread and butter or boiled new potatoes dressed while warm.
- Keeping the meatRefrigerate the cooked joint promptly and use within three or four days. Slice it straight from the cold and hold the finished platter chilled until it goes to table.
Cold-meat cookery of this kind was a fixed institution in household books, where a large roast was expected to reappear for a second and often a third meal. Mutton was then a common everyday roasting meat in Britain, and its dense fat sets hard when cold -- hence the insistence on very thin slices, the sharp pickles and a separate sauce to relieve it. The chopped jelly is a small piece of restaurant manner brought into the home kitchen: chopped aspic was the standard garnish for cold larder work in the classical French repertoire, and its appearance here shows how thoroughly that grammar of presentation had been absorbed into English-language cookbooks. That mutton has since given way almost entirely to young lamb is why the author's closing note now reads as the main instruction.