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Leg of Mutton, Lyonnaise
Procure a tender seven-pound leg of mutton, at least three days old. Beat it briskly with a flat cleaver all around, which will help to render the meat much more tender. Mix one tablespoon salt with a teaspoon white pepper and carefully rub the leg all over with it five or six hours before the time of cooking it. Make an incision with a small knife, two inches deep, along the shank bone (under the meat) and place in it a clove very sound peeled garlic, which will help to give an excellent appetising flavour to the meat. Place a mirepoix in a roasting pan. Lay the leg over it, spread one tablespoon melted fat on top, set in a hot oven to roast for one hour and ten minutes, being careful to pour one tablespoon hot water over the leg every ten minutes and to turn the meat over three or four times during that time. Finely mince six medium, sound white onions, season them with half teaspoon salt, then carefully brown them in a frying pan with half ounce butter for fifteen minutes, briskly tossing them meanwhile. Place the onions on a large, hot dish; lay the mutton over the onions. Skim the fat off the gravy, pour a gill demi-glace into the pan, reduce it on the fire for three minutes, strain over the leg and serve.
N. B. The remaining mutton will be used to-morrow.
A plain roast leg with two French props: a mirepoix under the meat and a bed of browned onions beneath it at the table. The points below cover the vocabulary and the two places where 1900 practice and modern practice diverge.
- Mutton, and what to buy insteadMutton is sheep over two years old, strong-flavoured and firm; almost no retail butcher stocks it now. A 6-7 lb bone-in leg of lamb behaves the same way in the pan but is milder and slightly quicker to cook.
- "At least three days old"This refers to hanging, not to meat you have left on the counter. It means aged carcass meat, which is more tender and less bloody than freshly slaughtered. Any leg from a butcher today has already been aged; keep it refrigerated and simply let it sit at room temperature for an hour before roasting.
- MirepoixRoughly diced onion, carrot and celery, sometimes with a bay leaf and a scrap of bacon or ham. It sits under the joint as a rack and as the flavour base for the pan juices. Half a pound total is enough for a leg this size.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperature; 425-450F is the usual modern reading of "hot oven." At that heat a 7 lb leg in 70 minutes will come out rare to medium-rare in the thick end. Use a thermometer rather than the clock: 130-135F at the centre for medium-rare, 145F for medium.
- Basting with waterA tablespoon of hot water every ten minutes keeps the pan bottom from scorching and the surface from drying, but it also drops the oven temperature each time the door opens. Basting three or four times over the hour is plenty; turning the joint twice is enough.
- A gill of demi-glaceA gill is half a cup. Demi-glace is reduced brown veal stock; a well-reduced beef or lamb stock, or a good commercial demi-glace concentrate diluted to half a cup, does the job. The three-minute reduction is meant to concentrate it, not to thicken it into sauce.
- The onionsFifteen minutes over moderate heat with constant tossing gives sweet, deeply coloured onions, not the pale sweated kind. Half an ounce of butter for six onions is lean; a full ounce keeps them from catching.
- Yield and restingA 7 lb leg serves eight generously, which is why the closing note assumes leftovers. Rest the meat 15-20 minutes on the onion bed before carving; the sauce goes over at the table.
Lyonnaise on a French menu means onions, and usually onions browned in butter — an association conventionally traced to Lyon and its onion-heavy bourgeois cooking, and applied across the repertoire from potatoes to tripe to this leg of mutton. The dish itself is unremarkable French household roasting; what dates it is everything around the meat. A leg hung three days, beaten with the flat of a cleaver, seasoned five hours ahead and pierced at the shank with a single garlic clove all belong to a period when mutton was ordinary eating and needed managing rather than showcasing. The closing note — that the rest of the leg will be used tomorrow — is the most honest line in the recipe, and a reminder that a book of this vintage assumed a household cooking through a joint over several days rather than a single dinner.