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Mutton Saute, Anglaise
Pick all the lean meat from the leg of mutton left over from Wednesday. Cut it into one-inch squares a quarter-inch thick. Finely slice two white onions and lightly fry in a frying pan with a tablespoon butter for eight minutes, stirring meanwhile, then add the mutton. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg; toss while cooking for five minutes; add one tablespoon flour, briskly stir, add two tablespoons vinegar, one tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, a gill tomato sauce and half gill demi-glace. Thoroughly mix, then add a teaspoon chopped parsley, gently mix again and let slowly cook for twenty minutes. Dress on a hot dish and serve.
A leftovers dish built on cooked meat, so nothing here needs long cooking — the twenty minutes is for the sauce, not the mutton. A few of the measures are pre-metric kitchen shorthand.
- The measuresA gill is usually reckoned 4 fl oz (US) but 5 fl oz imperial, so the tomato sauce is roughly a half cup and the demi-glace half that. A saltspoon is generally taken as about a quarter teaspoon.
- Tomato sauce, not ketchupIn a book of this vintage tomato sauce means a cooked, seasoned purée-based sauce, closer to a plain passata reduction than to bottled ketchup. Ketchup will make the dish sweet and sharp on top of the vinegar already present.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole combined with brown veal or beef stock and reduced. Two tablespoons of a good reduced brown stock, or a commercial demi-glace concentrate diluted per the packet, does the same job.
- The meat is already cookedThis is Wednesday's roast leg. Cut into the specified thin squares and keep the heat gentle: the five minutes of tossing is to warm and coat, and the twenty-minute simmer should barely bubble. Hard boiling turns already-roasted mutton stringy.
- If you cannot get muttonLeftover roast leg of lamb works directly, though it is milder and younger; you will want the nutmeg and Worcestershire slightly restrained so they do not dominate.
- The onionsEight minutes in butter should soften them without colour — "lightly fry" here means sweat. Browning them adds a sweetness that fights the vinegar.
- The flourOne tablespoon into the pan with the meat and butter needs a good half-minute of brisk stirring before any liquid goes in, or the sauce will taste pasty.
- YieldDepends entirely on how much lean meat came off the leg, but the sauce quantities suit roughly a pound of cooked meat and serve four.
The name is the giveaway: a French kitchen technique, sauté, applied to an English idea, cold roast mutton on the second or third day. The recipe assumes the reader knows what was served on Wednesday, and a great deal of professional-adjacent domestic cookery consisted of dressing yesterday's meat well enough that nobody minded seeing it again. Mutton, the meat of a mature sheep, was the ordinary roast of British tables well into the twentieth century before the trade shifted almost entirely to young lamb — a shift that came considerably earlier on American tables — which is why the strong seasoning here — vinegar, Worcestershire, nutmeg — reads as heavy-handed now. It was calibrated to a much more assertive meat.