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Ribs of Mutton, Currant Jelly
Procure a small rack of mutton of about three and a half pounds. Break the end bones and neatly trim the red skin from the top. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Lay it in the roasting tin, pour a tablespoon water into the tin, then set in the oven to roast for forty minutes, turning and basting it quite frequently meanwhile. Remove, dress the mutton on a large, hot dish, skim the fat from the gravy, pour the gravy over the rack and send to the table with currant jelly separately.
A plain roast that assumes a butcher's counter and a cook standing at the oven door. Two things need supplying: an oven temperature, which the original omits, and a doneness target, which forty minutes only hints at.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. For a rack this size, start at 450F for 10-15 minutes to colour the fat, then drop to 350F for the remainder.
- Forty minutes means pinkA 3 1/2 lb rack in a hot oven for forty minutes comes out rare to medium-rare, though the original states no doneness target. Use a thermometer: 130F at the thickest part of the eye for medium-rare, 140F for medium. Mutton and lamb both toughen and dry past that.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is older sheep, variously reckoned as over one year or over two, stronger in flavour and firmer; almost nothing sold as lamb in a supermarket qualifies. A rack of lamb of the same weight will cook in roughly the same time but taste considerably milder, and the currant jelly will do less work against it.
- "Break the end bones"Cracking through the chine bone at the base so the rack carves into separate chops. Ask the butcher to do it; it is awkward work with a domestic knife.
- "The red skin"Probably the fell, a thin papery membrane over the fat cap, which is commonly said to shrink in the heat and pull the meat out of shape. Whatever the reason, the recipe takes it off before roasting; the fat underneath stays.
- A tablespoon of waterThat is not a braising liquid, only enough to stop the drippings scorching in a shallow tin before the fat renders. Check it partway through; on a modern thin tin it can dry out entirely.
- The gravyWhat collects in the tin is drippings, not a sauce. Skim the fat, set the tin over a burner and loosen the browned residue with a few spoonfuls of stock or water before pouring.
- Rest itTen to fifteen minutes under loose foil before carving. The original sends it straight to table; resting costs nothing and keeps the juices in the meat rather than on the platter.
- YieldA 3 1/2 lb rack is seven or eight chops -- three to four people as a main course, more if it opens a longer menu.
Redcurrant jelly with mutton is a British table convention of long standing, generally traced to the older practice of serving sharp fruit alongside rich or strongly flavoured meat -- the same logic that puts apple with pork and gooseberry with mackerel. In the French-inflected hotel service of the period, the jelly is sent to the table "separately" rather than cooked into a sauce, leaving the diner to judge the balance. That the rack here is mutton rather than lamb is itself a period marker: older sheep were ordinary market meat then and are close to unobtainable in American retail now, having been squeezed out by a preference for the milder, faster-finished animal.