[Sca-cooks] Mutton

[Pixel, Goddess and Queen]

>
>     Actually, what you were sold probably was mutton. Under US law any sheep, any age, can be sold as lamb. The only thing the producers care about is the age at which the muscle growth-to-feed ratio starts falling off. For obvious reasons, they push that limit to the last quarter hour.
>     The situation is made more complex still by the fact that much of our lamb comes from Australia and New Zealand. In Australia, any sheep that has no permanent incisors is still lamb. In New Zealand, the first incisors may be present but not yet touching.
>   However, all these standards involve ages at which a sheep from our period of interest would be considered mutton. (By the Australian standard, "young mutton"). The important factor for our purposes is that sheep as young as six months old are already exclusively grass-fed and producing sex hormones, and it is those two factors which make sheep meat mutton.
>     In our era lamb was an animal either exclusively or primarily milk-fed - four to eight weeks old, preferably under six weeks old. The taste is much, much more delicate; it's even more obvious than the difference between real veal and beef. The chances are quite high that the vast majority of SCA cooks have never used, or even tasted, real lamb.
>     I happen to be allergic to mutton. I can, however, eat small amounts of milk-fed lamb. There's that much difference.
>

I agree--real lamb is VERY different from what we in the States generally 
get as "lamb". When the Consort and I were in Yorkshire I had a 
roasted lamb shank that was, by the size of it, a milk-fed lamb, and it 
was OMG delicious. I practically swooned, it was that good. It was served 
with a very simple sauce of vinegar, sugar, mint, and probably some water.

But yes, much more delicate and tender than what we get as lamb.

Margaret FitzWilliam