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Shoulder of Mutton, Bon-Veillard
Procure a tender, fat shoulder mutton, entirely bone it, season all over with a good teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, roll up shoulder and tie with strings. Place some trimmings of larding pork in a small roasting pan, lay shoulder on top, baste it with a tablespoon melted butter, set in oven for thirty minutes, turning shoulder and basting with a little hot water once in a while. Remove and place shoulder in a baking dish. Finely slice two medium, white onions, place in frying pan with fat of shoulder pan and cook for ten minutes, tossing once in a while. Add four medium, finely sliced, peeled raw potatoes to the onions, season with a teaspoon salt and cook for fifteen minutes more, frequently tossing meanwhile. Arrange potatoes around shoulder on dish, pour a little melted butter over all, set in the oven for thirty-five minutes more, remove, untie shoulder and immediately send to the table.
A boned, rolled shoulder finished on a bed of onions and potatoes cooked in its own drippings — essentially a boulangère garnish done in a skillet. The original gives no oven temperature and no weight, so both need filling in.
- MuttonMutton means mature sheep, generally reckoned over a year old and often over two, with darker meat and a much stronger flavour; in the US it is mostly found at halal and specialist butchers. A 3-4 lb boneless lamb shoulder is the usual substitute, though it is milder and more tender.
- Boning and tyingHave the butcher bone the shoulder and leave the fat cap on. Roll it with the fat outward and tie at 1-inch intervals so it holds a cylinder; an untied rolled shoulder will unfurl and cook unevenly.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives no oven temperature. A workable modern reading is 450F for the first thirty minutes to set and colour the outside, then 375F for the finish with the vegetables.
- Larding pork trimmingsScraps of fresh pork fatback, laid down as a rack so the meat does not scorch on the pan bottom. Unsmoked salt pork or plain pork fat works; if you use salt pork, cut the teaspoon of salt on the potatoes.
- Doneness, not the clockSixty-five minutes total suits a 3 lb roll and leaves it pink. Go by a thermometer at the thickest point: 130-135F for medium rare, 145F for medium, higher if you want the falling-apart texture older mutton rewards.
- The potatoes are the hingeSlice them thin, no more than an eighth of an inch, and keep them moving in the onion fat so they colour without sticking. They go into the oven already most of the way cooked; the final thirty-five minutes is for browning and for absorbing the drippings, not for cooking them through.
- Rest it anyway"Immediately send to the table" is about serving the potatoes hot. Let the meat sit ten minutes before untying and slicing, or the juices run out onto the dish.
- YieldA 3-4 lb boneless shoulder with four potatoes serves four to six.
The name is the puzzle here. Alexander Filippini, longtime chef at Delmonico's, filled The International Cook Book (1906) with several thousand short recipes tagged with proper names — patrons, colleagues, cities, and occasionally a garnish invented on the spot — and "Bon-Veillard" is not a term that survives in standard French culinary vocabulary; it reads as a personal dedication or a printer's rendering of something like bon vieillard, "good old man." The dish itself is entirely orthodox: sliced potatoes and onions cooked in the drippings of a roast is the boulangère method, generally traced to the practice of carrying a joint on its bed of potatoes to the village baker's oven to use the falling heat after the bread came out. That mutton rather than lamb is specified is a period marker, a reminder that the two were distinct items on the butcher's counter in 1906.