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Mutton or Lamb Rechauffe
Put a cup of butter in the bottom of a frying pan, with enough gravy or broth to cover some slices of cold underdone mutton or lamb. As soon as they are thoroughly heated, take them out, lay upon a hot dish, sprinkle with pepper and salt, and serve with a small spoonful of jelly laid upon each.
A leftovers dish from the era when a Sunday joint was expected to reappear on Monday. The whole method rests on warming the meat through without letting the liquid boil, which would tighten already-cooked mutton into leather.
- The butter is almost certainly excessiveA full cup of butter for a few slices of meat reads as either a misprint or the habit of a kitchen cooking for eight. Two to three tablespoons is enough to enrich the gravy in a standard skillet; the meat is being warmed, not fried.
- Keep it below a simmerThis is the hinge. The slices are already cooked, so the liquid should sit at a bare shiver, around 160-170F. Once the gravy boils, the meat contracts and goes stringy, and no amount of jelly will disguise it.
- "Underdone" meat and reheatingThe recipe assumes a joint roasted pink and kept cold in the larder or icebox. Leftover meat should be brought fully hot through, not merely warmed on the surface -- a couple of minutes in the hot gravy, turning once, and serve immediately.
- Gravy or brothThe original assumes yesterday's pan juices are in the larder. Good lamb or beef stock works; if using commercial stock, reduce it slightly first or the slices taste diluted rather than enriched.
- The jellyThe recipe specifies only "jelly"; red currant is the likeliest intention for mutton and lamb, with mint jelly a later and more Anglo-American substitute. Quince or crab apple jelly would also have been available.
- ServingNo yield is given. Reckon three or four slices per person as a light main course, with the hot dish genuinely hot -- warmed in the oven, since a cold plate undoes the entire operation.
Rechauffé is simply the French for "reheated," and its appearance in a cookbook says a good deal about how leftovers were framed for the middle-class household: a French name lent dignity to Monday's cold joint. Books of this period devote whole chapters to the subject, since a large roast was economical only if every scrap of it was accounted for, and refrigeration was an icebox at best. Mutton -- meat from a mature sheep, far more common on American and British tables then than now -- was firm and strongly flavoured, and reheating it gently in its own gravy with a spoonful of tart jelly was the standard remedy for both dryness and monotony. The pairing of sheep meat with currant jelly is generally traced to English practice, where sharp fruit preserves were held to cut the richness of the fat.