Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Meat Recipes › Cavalier's Broil
Cavalier's Broil
I moderate sized shoulder of mutton Salt and red pepper 3/4 pint (1½ cups) pickled mushrooms Half roast or parboil the shoulder of mutton, then lift it on to a hot dish, score on both sides down to the bone, season well with salt and red pepper, and finish cooking it over the fire or in the oven.
Skim the fat from the gravy, and keep the dish which contains it quite hot to receive the joint again. Warm the mushrooms, chop one-half cupful of them and sprinkle them over the broil; when it is ready to be served arrange the remainder round it and serve immediately.
To make the pickled mushrooms: Take some small and round button mushrooms, throw them into cold water, and rub each separately with a piece of flannel dipped in salt to clean it; put them again into fresh cold water, and finally into a pan with a handful of fine salt scattered over them. Place over a moderate fire, having covered them close so that the steam may not escape, for fifteen minutes, or until they are hot and the water is drawn well out of them; drain and dry well; keep them covered up from the air until they are cold; then place them in clean glass bottles with a blade of mace, fill up with white wine vinegar, and add to each bottle a teaspoonful of olive oil. Cork and seal.
The mutton half of this is straightforward butchery and heat; the pickled mushrooms are not, and they are what makes the page unsafe as printed. Notes below explain the terms and the specific failure.
- Why the preserve failsMushrooms are a low-acid food. Salting and steaming them for fifteen minutes, drying, bottling with mace and vinegar, then corking and sealing does not reliably acidify the interior of a whole button or bring the jar to a temperature that destroys Clostridium botulinum spores. A sealed, oxygen-poor, room-temperature jar is precisely the environment in which those spores germinate and produce toxin.
- The film of olive oilThe teaspoonful of oil in each bottle was meant to exclude air. It does exactly that, and in doing so it makes the anaerobic problem worse rather than better. Oil-covered vegetable preserves have been implicated in botulism outbreaks in the modern era for this reason.
- No measured acidThe recipe gives no vinegar strength, no ratio of vinegar to water, and no target pH. Vinegar of this period was not a standardised product. Without measured acidity there is no way to judge whether a batch is in the safe range, and a tested current pickling recipe should be used for mushrooms instead.
- Shoulder of muttonMutton is sheep over a year old, stronger and tougher than lamb and sold today mainly by specialist butchers. A shoulder is a hard-working, collagen-rich cut, which is why the original half-cooks it before scoring and finishing at high heat.
- "Broil" and "over the fire"In this period a broil means meat scored and finished at fierce direct heat, on a gridiron over coals or under the flame of a range. The scoring down to the bone is functional: it lets the seasoning and the heat reach the interior of a thick joint in the short time the finishing stage allows.
- The measuresThree-quarters of a pint is given in the text as 1 1/2 cups, which is the working figure to use. "A handful of fine salt" and "a blade of mace" are both unquantified, another sign that this preserve was made by eye.
- ServingThe dish depends on the platter being genuinely hot, since defatted mutton gravy sets to a paste the moment it cools.
"Cavalier" names in Victorian and Edwardian cookery books usually signal a deliberately old-fashioned, hearty English treatment rather than any documented seventeenth-century original; a scored and broiled joint dressed with a sharp pickle is the kind of dish such titles were meant to evoke. The technique itself is genuinely old: broiling a part-cooked joint after scoring it was standard practice when kitchens had a fire and a gridiron rather than a controllable oven, and the cuts made to the bone did the work that a lower, longer roast does now. Pickled mushrooms belonged to the same larder logic. Button mushrooms were seasonal and perishable, and household manuals of the period commonly carried a method for bottling them, along with mushroom ketchup and mushroom powder, so that their flavour could be brought out against plain roast meat in any month. Those methods were written before the cause of botulism was identified, which is why the bottling instructions here read as confidently as the rest of the recipe.