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Mutton with Curry
Cut the meat from the leg of mutton left over from yesterday in half-inch-square pieces. Heat one tablespoon butter in a saucepan, add one finely sliced onion and brown three minutes, then add one tablespoon flour; stir well, moisten with three-quarters of a pint of broth, and mix until it comes to a boil. Add the mutton with half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons white pepper, a teaspoon curry powder, half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and a half bean finely chopped garlic. Mix well, cover pan and let cook for thirty-five minutes, pour in a teaspoon vinegar, mix well and serve.
A leftover-meat dish built on a small flour-thickened gravy. Everything hinges on the fact that the mutton is already cooked, so the long covered simmer is there to soften it and marry the spice, not to cook it through.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is about 3/4 teaspoon of white pepper. That is aggressive by current palates; a quarter to a half teaspoon may suit modern taste better.
- "Half bean" of garlicA "bean" of garlic is a piece roughly the size of a bean, generally taken to mean about a clove, so this is around half a clove, finely chopped. Garlic sits as a background note against the curry powder and pepper.
- Three-quarters of a pintRoughly 1 1/2 cups if the book is using the American pint, closer to 1 3/4 cups on the British measure. Start at 1 1/2 cups and add more broth during the simmer if the sauce tightens too far.
- Bloom the curry powderCommercial curry powder tastes raw and dusty if it is only stirred into liquid. Add it to the butter with the onion, or to the flour before the broth goes in, and let it cook for thirty seconds so the spices open up.
- The simmerThirty-five minutes covered is right for the dry, fibrous end of a roast leg. If your leftover lamb is still tender and pink, build the sauce for twenty minutes on its own and give the meat only the last ten, or it will shred to threads.
- MuttonMutton means sheep over a year old, stronger and firmer than lamb, and it is rare in supermarkets. Leftover roast leg or shoulder of lamb works directly; the finished dish will be milder and will need less cooking.
- The vinegarThe teaspoon of vinegar at the end is not incidental: it sharpens a flat, floury gravy, doing the sort of work tamarind or lime does elsewhere. Add it off the heat so it does not cook away.
- YieldThe meat from a leftover leg will vary, but a tablespoon of butter and flour and 1 1/2 cups of broth suits about a pound of cooked meat, serving two to three over rice.
Curried leftovers were a fixture of Anglo-American household cookery from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, and the wording here shows exactly why: the recipe opens with the leg of mutton "left over from yesterday," assuming a reader working through a joint across several meals. Commercial curry powder, a British blend rather than an Indian one, made this possible for cooks who had never seen a spice box; it turned cold roast meat into something that read as a new dish rather than a reheated one. The flour-and-broth base, the browned onion, and the finishing vinegar are the standard European treatment of the period, in which curry functioned as a flavoring for a conventional brown sauce.