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Braised Leg of Mutton
Have the butcher bone a leg of mutton. Wipe, stuff, sew and place in deep pan. Cook five minutes in one-fourth cup butter, a slice each of onion, carrot, and turnip cut in dice, one-half bay leaf and a sprig each of thyme and parsley; then add three cups hot water, one and one-half teaspoon salt, and twelve peppercorns. Pour over mutton, cover closely and cook in oven slowly three hours, uncovering for the last half hour. Remove from pan to hot platter. Brown three tablespoons butter, add four tablespoons flour, then pour on slowly the strained liquor; there should be one and threefourths cups.
A straightforward pot-roast braise, but the original leaves two things unsaid: the oven temperature and what the stuffing is made of. Both are assumed knowledge in a 1900s meat chapter.
- Slow ovenThe book gives no temperature; "cook in oven slowly" is usually taken as somewhere around 300-325F. At that range a boned leg should be tender in about three hours; higher and the outside dries before the interior gives up its connective tissue.
- Mutton vs. lambTrue mutton — sheep over two years — is rare outside halal and specialty butchers. A boneless leg of lamb of 4 to 6 lb behaves the same way in this braise but is milder and will be done closer to two and a half hours.
- The stuffingNo stuffing recipe is given here. A period bread stuffing — soft breadcrumbs, melted butter, salt, pepper, and sage or thyme, moistened just enough to hold — is a reasonable choice; roughly 2 to 3 cups fills a boned leg. Pack it loosely so it can swell.
- Sewing and tyingKitchen twine and a trussing needle do the job; butcher's netting or simply tying at 1-inch intervals works as well. The cavity must be closed or the stuffing washes out into the braising liquid.
- Two pans, not oneThe butter, diced vegetables and herbs are cooked five minutes on the stovetop, then the hot water and seasonings are added and the whole thing poured over the meat. The mutton itself is not browned first; the browning comes later, in the butter for the gravy.
- Uncovering at the endThe last half hour without a lid colors the surface and concentrates the liquor. Do not skip it, or the meat comes out pale and the sauce thin.
- The gravyBrown the butter, add the flour, then whisk in the strained liquid slowly to avoid lumps. Four tablespoons flour to 1 3/4 cups liquid gives a fairly thick gravy; skim the fat from the pan liquor first or it will be greasy.
- YieldA boned leg serves 8 to 10. Rest it 15 minutes under foil before slicing, and cut across the grain — the stuffing holds the slices together.
Braising a boned leg was the standard way to make older sheep palatable: mutton from a mature animal has firm, well-worked muscle that roasting turns to leather, while three hours of moist heat at low temperature breaks it down. The method here closely resembles the classic French *braise à blanc* as it might appear in an American household book — a mirepoix of onion, carrot and turnip sweated in butter, a bouquet of bay, thyme and parsley, whole peppercorns, and a flour-and-butter gravy built from the strained cooking liquor at the end. Mutton was ordinary meat in American and British kitchens through the nineteenth century and largely disappeared from the domestic market over the first half of the twentieth, when lamb, slaughtered young and marketed as milder, took its place; recipes like this one survive mainly as evidence of the older preference.