Mutton

Mouton

What it is

English keeps the Norman word for the meat and the Saxon one for the animal — mutton on the table, sheep in the field — a split left over from the century when the people who ate it and the people who herded it spoke different languages. Mutton means a carcass over two years old, and its flavour comes from branched-chain fatty acids in the tallow that a lamb simply has not built yet.

In the kitchen

Trim the hard fat hard before cooking — that is where the strongest flavour sits — and give it three hours of moist heat, not one. It is the right animal for a navarin or a curry, where lamb dissolves into blandness.

Goes with

Turnip Barley Cumin Garlic Onion Carrot Bay leaf Harissa

Same species

Pauillac lamb Salt marsh lamb Sisteron lamb Lamb fries Lamb brain Leg of lamb

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