Mutton doesn't fit much our western traditional cooking esthetics where we want tasty but subtle. Lamb and mutton are for different types of recipes. As a french guy selling and importing high end food in South East Asia, I've tasted quite a wide array of lambs.
The best lamb is young, but not too young. I'm not a fan of milk-fed lamb where I feel there is quite no taste. The right balance is slaughtered at around 90 to 150 days old. Agneau de Sisteron is a gem. You don't need to be highly skilled to cook it. For cutlets, just pan sear until pink inside. For roast and leg, oven, basted with salt olive oil, some garlic cloves inserted inside the meat. It's truly magnificent.
The older the animal, the bolder the recipes it needs. The best lamb/mutton I've ever had was in Marocco, a slow roasted lamb in honey and almonds. So tender it was served from the bone with a spoon. You'll notice that mutton is always cooked in a way to counter balance the strong muttony flavour and sublime it with contrasts. Mutton curries are also delicious for the same reason.
When I was working construction in Singapore, I used to get mutton biryanis with my field guys. The rice and mutton came wrapped in waxed paper along with a bag of pappadams and a separate bag of "gravy." Insanely delicious and cheap. The only problem was being comatose after such a heavy lunch.
Yes! Mutton biryani and mutton steak (for the uninitiated, that's not what you think it is) are my go-to orders. At any hawker centre I usually make a beeline for the Indian Muslim stall. Of course, as you say, office workers eating food designed for labourers has its own problems.
> office workers eating food designed for labourers has its own problems.
Reminds me of traditional food in Innsbruck, Austria. It's great if you, say, work in the snowy forests 12 hours a day doing hard labor, but those calories are not real healthy if you're sedentary.
Both are eaten in Singapore. Unhelpfully, the Malay term "kambing" can refer to either, and consequently so can "mutton". Generally speaking, locally sourced kambing will be goat (it's too hot for sheep in the tropics), but from NZ etc it will be sheep.
as a Hyderabadi, I fully approve of mutton biryani posts in HN. :D
Probably, my current favorite dish. Have been eating it multiple time every week for decades now and its charm has never faded. That said, it does play havoc with your triglycerides.
In South Asia/diaspora/influenced cuisines, mutton = goat. This is a good tip to keep in mind for South Asian halal butchers too. Mine in the US proudly sells mutton which is goat.
Some of the best mutton I ever head were curries in India, fresh from a farm in NZ, Ireland or Iceland and from those road side bbq places in Tunesia.
Since we love it, we have it quite often at home, either as minced meat (sometimes mixed with beef) for all kinds of stuff or from tje bbq. Since mutton is not such a common thing for Germans, if you want good one, you have to get from Turkish butchers.
The honey and almond thing is something to try for sure!
It depends on which part of India you're in. The parts where sheep are reared will serve sheep. The others will sell goat (but will label it as `lamb')
> Australia and New Zealand have Western traditional aesthetics, Lamb and mutton are common here. What changed here ?
In my personal experience, mutton is not common in contemporary Australia. My local supermarkets (Woolworths and Coles) stock lamb, but I don’t remember either of them ever selling mutton. Maybe some specialty butchers might stock it, I don’t know, there isn’t much culture of eating it among the younger generations. That said, I imagine if I went back in a time machine to the 1950s or earlier, it would be much easier to find mutton in Australia.
Only time - that I can recall - ever eating “mutton” was in India - and I’ve been told that a lot of Indian “mutton” isn’t actually mutton, it is goat. You can buy goat meat here, most supermarkets don’t, but I’ve seen it in specialty butchers
I grew up in Australia with mutton making up 90% of my meat intake, as we slaughtered our own merino wethers (so not the breeds of lamb raised for eating).
The local butchers would also have a decent stock of different cuts, particularly things like neck chops for stews. Numbers of sheep around are lower now, so that may have limited things a little.
I also think hogget is equally as or more common than lamb in city butchers. Some of those chops are huge and have a nice tang.
OMG, every time we visit Grandma we hear the stories about the difference between Lamb and Mutton and that that, actually, everything we buy these days in Mutton and they stopped labeling it mutton because Lamb is more expensive. And nothing is as good at it used to be.
Agreed, I remember growing up in country WA and we would have mutton as it was a cheaper option afaik, but it’s almost impossible to get these days - all lamb.
UK too, TFA accurately scoped it to America, GP's just generalising it further (incorrectly) or perhaps means 'American' not 'Western'.
And on the Asia point, I'm pretty sure in India at least 'mutton' can refer to goat or 'lamb' of any age, typically goat, it's not making a rigid (regulated) distinction based on the age of the animal.
Same in Germany (well, lamb (regulated as max age 1 year), I haven’t actually seen mutton anywhere. Even the middle eastern butcher only sells lamb), though we mostly tend to import it from NZ for some reason.
NZ has insane economies of scale and other efficiencies that mean it makes the cheapest lamb in the world. NZ lamb is usually cheaper than Welsh even in UK supermarkets.
Sorry, let me pause here for a minute and highlight the fact that this article talks about Mutton in the US which is not traditionally known for "tasty but subtle".
I. think that the "tasty but subtle" cooking esthetic is not necessarily "western" or western is to broad a term. It's the cooking esthetic of Cantonese cuisine (eastern), Japanese food (specifically Kaiseki), French food and Teo Chew cuisine to a lesser extent (more seasoned than Cantonese cuisine). It's also seen in other countries in Europe but less so (more often as part of the fine dining which has been influenced by the legacy of French cuisine)
Note that while I, personally, mostly tend to like "tasty but subtle", it doesn't mean that I criticize or dislike other cuisine which have their own advantages.
And, lastly, as a kid living in a French rural area, I had my share of mutton (which I absolutely detested back then but now can appreciate)...
It has a changed quite drastically but I (n=1) was raised on Julia Child cookbooks, so tasty (and rich!) but subtle could probably still describe my palette. Traveling France, everything I ate out seemed so familiar and wholesome but it took a lunch of duck to realize why in a lightbulb moment. Child was so influential I doubt I’m alone.
I’d eat mutton in a heartbeat (now and as a child) though maybe more because the Hobbit and dwarves did too!
That's interesting. After watching the movie based on Julia Child's life I was always interested to know how much it had an impact on cooking in the US.
I didn't say anything about goat, but mutton is common/popular enough to be available in supermarkets (nevermind actual butchers, as you might have to go to for some game or a particular cut or something). The comment I replied to claimed that Americans don't eat mutton because it's unsuited to 'Western cuisine'. Lamb and mutton are no stranger to British roasts, pies, stews, etc. - we don't even have to introduce 'curry'.
While I do agree that mutton requires more hardy recipes I strongly disagree about the subtle esthetics of western cusine as such.
If that was the case we would all crave goat. A young goat is very tender and delicate.
It can probably be found but I have personally never seen it in a shop. I only tried it because a family member keeps them as pets.
Another case could be made for the horse. It used to be a working animal and we would happily eat it. But today it is very hard to come by even though it is really tasty. And many would today look at you as if you suggested eating a dog. And let us not even go there :-)
In the UK there is also "hogget" [1] which is a halfway house between lamb and mutton. Our neighbour raises mountain sheep (mainly because they are hardier and don't need as much help to give birth) that are smaller than commercial sheep. As a result, they weren't really big enough to eat as lamb but were very tasty as hogget.
Etymologically, English uses different words for animals than the meat, and the food word comes from the french (cow/beef/boeuf, pig/pork/porc, sheep/mutton/mouton). Looking at goat in french, Chèvre, that is used quite regularly to describe goat's milk cheeses, but I've never heard it or a derivative to refer to goat meat. Typical dishes I've seen are things like "curried goat". Wikipedia has some more info, but notably, the article title is "goat meat".
The original meaning of mutton is an adult sheep. In English I don't believe there is a proper name for goat meat other than "goat meat". In some areas of the Anglosphere mutton is used to refer to goat meat.
Some local curry restaurants in the Bay Area use goat for recipes that call for mutton, and sell it as mutton curry – but I assume that's because mutton is not an option...
If you visit areas with less domesticated animals that forage semi wild with shepards that check in now and again you might struggle to tell the difference between a sheep and a goat - the varieties of each are broader than many people realise and there is a considerable degree of visual overlap in the full spectrum of Sheep Vs. Goat.
Sheep and goats are so skeletally similar that archaeologists can't easily tell the difference. I just googled and there are signs like the third cusp of the third molar etc but I remember an archaeologist telling me that they just refer to them as sheepgoats, as though there was some mystical single type in antiquity.
Great, you get goat meat when you order mutton in the Bay Area? Here where I live, people sell mutton (sheep/lamb) even when asked for goat meat. I don't know why but people here always prefer goat meat to mutton.
Goat has too much of a satanic connotation perhaps. There was a marketing term from 1922 "chevon", doesn't that sound a lot like se7en to you? (Seven sins etc).
As a North European from a country where sheep are raised for wool and the meat is near-inedible, I can absolutely attest that there are huge differences in the texture and taste of lamb and mutton.
The problem is not that it's mutton, the problem is that sheep bred for wool are not the same as sheep bred for meat. Plus said country doesn't really have a tradition for cooking mutton, other than "drop it in a pot with cabbage and boil for hours".
Are you saying New Zealand ("said country") doesn't have a tradition for cooking mutton? You are dead wrong on that. It may be a little out of fashion today but mutton has been a kiwi staple for generations. You can still reliably find mutton in any given supermarket and mutton cookery goes well beyond "drop it in a pot with cabbage and boil for hours". Your post is incredibly ignorant.
As far as I know, for any type of meat it will go from soft to hard and then back to soft as you go from short to long cooking times. So lamb cooked to pink is quite delicious. But if you want it cooked all the way through, you have to go for a very long time to get back to a nice texture.
And of course eating meat that is pink is a luxury of having very high level of hygiene from the farm all the way to the table. This is difficult and expensive, so even in the highest income countries it has only become common in the last few decades.
Here in Scandinavia our traditional dishes involving lamb are also based on boiling or steaming the meat for many hours. If you had offered my late grandfather a piece of lamb that was pink inside, he would have refused to eat it.
That's also because the primary function of sheep in Scandinavia was to provide wool, so they would be deep in mutton territory by the time they were slaughtered and require low & slow cooking to make the meat edible.
> And of course eating meat that is pink is a luxury of having very high level of hygiene from the farm all the way to the table. This is difficult and expensive, so even in the highest income countries it has only become common in the last few decades.
Is this true? People have been eating rare or medium-rare meat since forever. Maybe it was more a cultural thing in Scandinavia to boil or steam. I certainly know people who order New Zealand grass bed beef steak well done (while the waiter cringes).
On the other hand if you offered me pink chicken I would be revolted.
> People have been eating rare or medium-rare meat since forever.
It's not safe, one thing are the bacteries that you can catch from raw/undercooked meat that was not stored correctly, another thing is the parasites, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinella_spiralis
Depends on the part of the sheep and the age. Generally chops and a few other parts are great pink. But mutton chops are still quite tough sometimes like this. Leg and shoulder usually need slow cooking.
You just have to trust you won't get any infection from that, so the whole 'manufacturing' chain has to be properly set up and supervised. Once you have that, you can eat raw meat. It's quite common in many places, here (in Europe) we eat steak tartare which is raw beef.
germany has a big tradition of eating raw minced pork (mettbrötchen - bread roll with raw minced pork, diced onions salt and pepper). and its perfectly safe because the food safety laws are so strict. its so safe that even gas station variations of this are very popular
I don't have a problem with most undercooked or even raw meats as long as I trust the supply chain (I can imagine how this would be problematic in India). The latest trend of medium-rare pork is a bit too daring for me, though.
That's because there is a difference between trichinosis from undercooked pork and E. coli from the unhygenic handling of cut meat in general. E. coli mostly infects just the surface of cut meat so as long as it's cooked well on the outside, the insides can still be quivering and ready for action. Trichinella, on the other hand, can be found throughout pork and thorough cooking is the only way to render it harmless.
The best lamb is young, but not too young. I'm not a fan of milk-fed lamb where I feel there is quite no taste. The right balance is slaughtered at around 90 to 150 days old. Agneau de Sisteron is a gem. You don't need to be highly skilled to cook it. For cutlets, just pan sear until pink inside. For roast and leg, oven, basted with salt olive oil, some garlic cloves inserted inside the meat. It's truly magnificent.
The older the animal, the bolder the recipes it needs. The best lamb/mutton I've ever had was in Marocco, a slow roasted lamb in honey and almonds. So tender it was served from the bone with a spoon. You'll notice that mutton is always cooked in a way to counter balance the strong muttony flavour and sublime it with contrasts. Mutton curries are also delicious for the same reason.