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Saddle of Mutton, Grecienne
Procure a four-rib piece tender saddle of mutton. Remove red skin from top and all fat from inside, fold up flanks inside and firmly tie all around. Place a mirepoix in a small braising pan, lay the saddle over. Season with heavy teaspoon salt and half saltspoon green pepper, and lightly baste the saddle with a little melted lard. Set in oven to roast twenty-five minutes, turning once in a while. Bring it to the oven door, pour in two tablespoons brandy and a half gill sherry, then set fire to brandy and continually baste saddle until the fire goes out. Add four tablespoons currant jelly, one gill demi-glace and one and a half gills pure tomato juice; reset in oven twenty minutes more. Remove, dress saddle on a hot dish, untie and keep hot. Strain sauce through a Chinese strainer into a small saucepan. Skim fat from surface, add two ounces well-picked Corinth raisins, boil five minutes. Pour sauce over saddle and serve.
A braise-roast in the grand-hotel manner: the meat is barely cooked through, flamed at the oven door, and finished in its own sauce. Two things need attention before you start — the cut, and the fact that no oven temperature is given anywhere.
- Oven heatNo oven temperature is given anywhere in the original. A hot roasting oven, in the region of 425F for the first twenty-five minutes and easing to about 375F once the liquids go in, is a reasonable modern reading, but it is inference rather than instruction. Total cooking of forty-five minutes for a four-rib saddle should leave the meat pink at the bone.
- The cutA saddle is the unsplit double loin, both sides still joined at the backbone, with the flanks (belly flaps) left long so they can be folded under and tied. Almost no supermarket carries this; a butcher will cut and tie one to order. A 3-4 lb saddle of lamb behaves the same way and is far easier to find than true mutton, which is sheep over two years old and much stronger in flavor.
- UnitsA gill is half a cup, so a half gill of sherry is 4 tablespoons and a gill of demi-glace is 1/2 cup; the tomato juice, at one and a half gills, is 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "half a saltspoon" is an eighth of a teaspoon.
- Green pepperProbably not the vegetable. In the seasoning formulas of this period "green pepper" alongside salt most likely stands for green peppercorns, crushed, rather than sweet green bell pepper. Freshly cracked black pepper is an acceptable substitute.
- Mirepoix and demi-glaceThe mirepoix here is a bed of roughly diced carrot, onion and celery with a bay leaf and thyme, laid in the pan to lift the meat and flavor the drippings. Demi-glace in this period means a brown sauce reduced with brown stock; a good commercial demi-glace concentrate or a well-reduced homemade brown stock both work, but bouillon cubes will make the sauce salty once it reduces again.
- The flambePull the pan clear of the oven and onto a heatproof surface before adding spirits, keep your face and sleeves back, and have a lid within reach. The point is to burn off the raw alcohol and set the sherry and brandy into the pan drippings, so keep basting until the flame dies of its own accord rather than smothering it early.
- Straining and finishingA "Chinese strainer" is a chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer; any fine sieve does. Skim carefully — mutton fat sets hard and tastes tallowy when it cools on the plate. "Corinth raisins" are dried currants, the small black kind; five minutes at a boil is enough to plump them and tighten the sauce.
- YieldA four-rib saddle serves four generously, or six if the meat is carved thin in long slices parallel to the backbone, which is the traditional service. Rest it ten minutes under foil before untying and carving.
The book is Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, written by a former Delmonico's chef who arranged thousands of short entries as a working reference for professional and ambitious domestic kitchens, and dish names in it are largely restaurant labels rather than regional claims. "Grecienne" here signals the sweet-sour treatment — currant jelly, sherry, tomato and Corinth raisins — that nineteenth-century menu French tended to attach to Greece and the eastern Mediterranean; the raisins themselves take their name from Corinth, the port that shipped them, and the English word "currant" is a worn-down form of the same place name. Saddle of mutton was a prestige roast in this period, the sort of joint carved in the dining room, and its near-total disappearance from American and British butchery over the twentieth century is why the cut now has to be ordered rather than bought. The flaming of brandy at the oven door, with continuous basting until the fire dies, is a hotel-kitchen flourish of the era that also does real work: it burns off some of the alcohol while glazing the surface of the meat.