But seriously (ok, maybe not that seriously,) there really is a campaign to bring back mutton, and it is headed by Prince Charles. Read about it here:
I love that sentence: “aged for two weeks after slaughter by hanging.” Hell of a way to go. (I hope they at least break their necks instead of letting them strangle to death.) Someone might want to change that phrasing, but it’s not going to be me.
I don’t know where the hell to get mutton here in the US, apart from going to a sheep farmer and buying the stuff from him personally. They sure as hell don’t sell it in stores. Is there any chance of it making a comeback in America? I’ve never had it before - does it taste good? Any mutton fans?
I’ve had mutton a few times in Cuba. I thought it was delicious. It was a lot like beef; I thought it was more like beef than lamb. It was in a stew though, and it was falling-apart tender.
Maybe this is a woosh on my part, but my guess scrambled sentence structure. It probably should read “aged for two weeks by hanging after slaughter” After you slaughter, you usually hang the meat by a hook and let it age. slaughter by stangulation would mean you’d lose a large part of your market due to reigious reasons.
I recently got my hands on a leg of mutton, but I have a connection with a farmer who raises lambs. She talked to the man who slaughters her lambs, to see if he also slaughters any older animals. He does, and I got a 3 lb leg of mutton through him.
I boned it, used the joint to make stock, then did a slow Irish stew. When I first started cooking the mutton stock, and later the stew, it smelled much stronger than lamb, but after cooking it was only mildly stronger in flavor. Very sheep-y and delicious.
My mistake. Apparently I followed your link to Wikipedia, clicked through to the official site, and promptly forgot my trip through Wiki. :smack: In any case, it looks like the Wikipedia page is (surprise!) inaccurate and poorly worded. The official site does not include that wording or say that meat that does not meat their standards cannot still be called “mutton,” only that the term “Renaissance Mutton” is reserved for meat that does.
I frequently eat mutton and find it very tasty, without that greasy repeating note lamb can have (though I do also love lamb). It’s not really strong in flavour, but deeper and more developed. Think of the difference between veal and beef. Cooked right, it’s as tender as any meat I’ve had. Prince Charles is out of touch; he doesn’t need to revive mutton, he just needs to find out about the people who live in the country. All the Halal shops seem to sell it, and half the time if you get curry goat from a Caribbean takeaway or restaurant, that’s mutton too, for instance.
Here in France you can’t buy mutton in the usual butchers, just lamb. However, you * can * often buy a whole sheep or goat from some of the Halal butchers.
A couple of weeks ago I chose mutton as my meat of choice for a byriani in an Indian restaurant (in the Indian part of town) and it was as I remembered from childhood in the UK. Stronger (meatier ? gamier ?) taste than lamb; potential for more chewiness; potential for fattiness.
The SD is perhaps not the place for what I’m going to say next (but this isn’t GQ) - I’m pretty sure I was told at primary school that eating lamb was a sneaky marketing/money saving idea from the antipodes. “Teacher said” that the New Zealand and Australian farmers didn’t want to spend money on over-wintering their lambs, allowing them to grow into mutton, so they started a campaign to wean the mother country onto lamb. I wonder how true that is …
As a New Zealander, I have eaten sheep of all ages. Though lamb is the one everyone tends to be the most common, we used to have mutton a lot as it was, I believe, often cheaper. I like it very much, and kind of miss it.
One of the wonderful parts about Wikipedia is that nobody has any excuse to complain about it. If it’s broke, you can, and should, fix it. You read the page and thought it “inaccurate and poorly worded”? Then read the link you just provided, re-write the Wikipedia article so that it is accurate and well written and put in the reference.
Hey, gaffa, you have the link and are obviously wise in the ways of Wiki, so I suggest you rewrite the article and forgo telling me what I should or should not do in the future. If you can’t, please start another thread.
Sheep, young or old, are a good excuse to use more garlic. Had mutton slow-roasted in a pig roaster and it was wonderful, once I convinced myself it was not a large dog.