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February 1
Menu: Braised Loin of Mutton with; Mushrooms; Boiled Potatoes; Spinach Garnished with Hard-Cooked; Eggs; Spiced Currants; Carrot Salad; Coffee; Coffee Jelly; Braised Loin of Mutton with Mushrooms-3 pounds loin mutton, 1 stalk celery, 1/2 teaspoon whole peppers, 1 bunch of sweet herbs, 2 tablespoons Crisco, pepper, salt, red pepper, 1 turnip, 1 carrot, 2 or 3 cloves, sprig of parsley, and 2 tablespoons flour. Remove bone from mutton, thoroughly rub it with salt, pepper, and red pepper; roll up and tie into roll; cut up celery, onion, carrot, and turnip, and lay them at bottom of stewpan with sweet herbs and parsley; lay mutton on top of these, and pour round enough water to 3 parts cover it, simmer slowly 1/2 to 2 hours; lift mutton into dripping tin with few tablespoons gravy; set in brisk oven until brown; strain gravy and skim off fat, put Crisco into saucepan, and when brown, add flour, and brown also; then add gravy gradually, little pepper and salt, and 1 dozen button mushrooms, skinned; boil 8 minutes; dish mutton with mushrooms round, and gravy strained over.
A straightforward braise-then-roast, printed here to sell Crisco in the browned-flour gravy. The page's ingredient list and method disagree in a couple of places, so read both before shopping.
- The hinge: brown the roux, not just the fatThe gravy's character comes from cooking the Crisco until it colours, then cooking the flour in it until it browns too. Take that to a nutty tan over medium heat before any liquid goes in; pale roux gives a thin, floury sauce that no amount of simmering will fix.
- "1/2 to 2 hours" is a typoA three-pound rolled loin will not be tender in thirty minutes. Read it as 1 1/2 to 2 hours at a bare simmer, and judge by feel rather than clock.
- Missing and extra ingredientsThe method calls for onion, which the list omits; add one medium onion. Conversely the list gives whole peppers and cloves that the method never mentions -- tie them into the herb bundle or a bit of cheesecloth so they can be fished out.
- "Brisk oven"A hot oven, roughly 400-450F. Ten to fifteen minutes is enough to colour the outside; the meat is already cooked, and longer only dries it.
- "A bunch of sweet herbs"Usually glossed as parsley stems, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string, though the mixture varied. Marjoram or savory would not be out of place.
- Button mushrooms, skinnedCookbooks of this date routinely direct that mushrooms be peeled; modern small buttons need only wiping. Eight minutes of boiling in the gravy is fine for whole buttons; halved ones will be done in half that.
- Sourcing the muttonMutton means sheep over about two years old and is a special-order item in most of North America. A boned, rolled lamb loin behaves the same way in this method but is milder and cooks faster; check for tenderness at the low end of the range.
- YieldThree pounds of boned loin serves four to five as a main course.
This page comes from The Story of Crisco, the 1913 promotional cookbook Procter & Gamble published to introduce hydrogenated vegetable shortening to American kitchens, and it belongs to the book's "Calendar of Dinners" -- a menu for every day of the year, which is why the entry runs straight into February 2's artichoke soup and fried fillets. The recipe itself is English in style, with a bed of root vegetables and sweet herbs. Mutton was still ordinary meat in 1913; its near-disappearance from American butcher counters came later, and is often traced to the canned mutton served to soldiers in the world wars.