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Boiled Leg of Mutton or Lamb
Wash a leg of mutton or lamb clean and wipe dry. Do not leave the shank and knuckle so long as to be unshapely. Put into a pot with hot water (salted) enough to cover it, and boil until tender. You can ascertain if it is tender by probing with a fork in the thickest part. Skim off all the scum as it rises. Allow fourteen minutes to each pound. Take from the fire, drain perfectly dry, and serve with melted butter, with capers, or nasturtium seed, or it may be served with drawn butter, capers or dice of hard boiled eggs. Boil the meat in a cloth.
A plain boiled joint, and the method still works, but two things in the original need translating: the cloth and the timing.
- The hinge: keep it below a boilA hard boil at 212F squeezes and toughens leg meat and clouds the liquid with scum. Bring the pot up, skim, then hold it at a bare tremble around 180-185F for the whole cooking time.
- Boiling in a clothThe final line means wrapping the joint in scalded muslin or cheesecloth tied with string, which keeps the surface from shredding and holds the shape. A double layer of cheesecloth or a loose net bag does the same job; it is optional, not structural.
- Fourteen minutes to the poundThat gives roughly grey-through meat: about 1 hour 40 minutes for a 7 lb leg. A thermometer is more reliable than the fork test — 145F at the thickest part away from bone for pink lamb, 160F and up for the fully cooked result this book expects.
- Size of jointA whole leg of lamb today runs 6-9 lb bone-in and will need a large stockpot; a shank half of about 4 lb fits an ordinary pot and serves six to eight. Mutton, meaning sheep over a year old, is now a specialty order from a halal butcher or farm supplier.
- Salting the water"Enough to cover" plus salt is vague. Use about 1 tablespoon of salt per quart of water — enough to season the outer meat without turning the joint into brine.
- Drawn butterIn this period drawn butter is a light flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply melted butter: roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 1 tablespoon flour cooked together, thinned with a cup of the cooking liquid. Melted butter with capers is the simpler option the recipe offers first.
- Nasturtium seedGreen nasturtium seed pods pickled in vinegar were the standard kitchen-garden substitute for capers. Pickled capers or caper berries stand in directly.
- The cooking liquidSave it. Skimmed of fat it is a good light stock for barley soup, and it makes a serviceable base for the accompanying sauce.
Boiled mutton was one of the fixed points of the nineteenth-century English and American dinner table, and its survival in a book called Twentieth Century Cook Book shows how slowly meat cookery changed. Boiling suited a tough, strongly flavoured joint from an older animal and, unlike roasting, it needed no open fire and little attention beyond skimming — useful in a kitchen where a range was shared with the week's baking. The caper sauce pairing is old and durable: the sharp, salty pickle cuts the fat of sheep, and where imported capers were expensive, cooks pickled nasturtium seeds from the garden instead, a substitution recorded in household books from the eighteenth century onward. Boiling meat in a cloth was a common practice for the same reason puddings were: it protected the surface and made a large piece easier to lift out whole.