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Mutton Steaks, Plum Sauce
Have three steaks of three-quarters of a pound each cut from a tender leg of mutton; make a few incisions on the skin all around steaks. Neatly flatten, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Heat two tablespoons melted lard in a frying pan, place steaks one beside another in the pan and fry six minutes on each side. Remove, place on a hot dish, pour a plum sauce over and serve.
A plain fry-up that depends almost entirely on the cut and on not overcooking it. The book assumes you already have its plum sauce made and hot.
- The sauce is elsewhereNo plum sauce is given here; the book gives its sauces as separate entries. Any sharp, lightly sweetened plum sauce works: stewed plums passed through a sieve, loosened with stock or pan juices and cut with vinegar or lemon.
- Finding muttonMutton means sheep over roughly two years old, and it is not stocked by most supermarkets. Halal and Caribbean butchers are the reliable source; otherwise use leg of lamb, which is milder and cooks faster.
- Cutting the steaksAsk for leg steaks cut across the bone about 3/4 inch thick — three at 12 oz each is a large portion by current standards. Boneless slices cut from the top of the leg also work and cook more evenly.
- Why the incisionsThe cuts through the skin and the surrounding silverskin stop the steak from bowing up in the pan as the connective tissue tightens. Nick through the band of membrane at intervals rather than slashing into the meat.
- TimingSix minutes a side will take a 3/4-inch steak well past pink; mutton is often preferred that way, but lamb of the same thickness is better at about four minutes a side and a short rest. Judge by feel or an instant thermometer rather than the clock.
- Lard and pan crowdingTwo tablespoons of lard is right for the job and takes higher heat than butter; a neutral oil substitutes cleanly. Three large steaks side by side need a 12-inch pan, or they will steam instead of browning — cook in two batches if the pan is smaller.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt across a little over two pounds of meat is about right, but salt the steaks and leave them ten minutes before frying so the surface dries and browns.
- YieldThree steaks, three servings as written. Split each steak after cooking and it feeds six alongside potatoes and a green vegetable.
Mutton was the ordinary red meat of British and much of European cooking well into the twentieth century, and a leg steak — cut across the joint like a ham steak — was the quick supper end of a cut usually roasted or boiled. The pairing with plums belongs to a long tradition of serving strong, fatty meats with a sharp fruit sauce, the same logic that puts mint or redcurrant jelly next to lamb and applesauce next to pork. Filippini's International Cook Book is built from short, formulaic entries like this one, each a variation on a technique finished with a different sauce. That mutton has since given way almost entirely to young lamb is the main reason the recipe now reads as unfamiliar.