[Sca-cooks] Mutton

Honour Horne-Jaruk jarukcomp at yahoo.com
Thu Apr 28 21:02:37 PDT 2011


Respected friends:
(Much snipped)
--- On Thu, 4/28/11, David Friedman <ddfr at daviddfriedman.com> wrote:

> We have at least one
> recipe that specifies mutton, for which we've used lamb, and
> I wanted to see how much difference it would make so I
> looked up local halal butchers. Yesterday I picked up two
> pounds of meat (including the bones--I got about 1 1/4lb of
> meat out of it) at about $8/lb, which struck me as
> expensive. When we made the dish, we didn't notice any
> change in taste at all, which set me wondering whether the
> mutton was really mutton.

> -- David/Cariadoc

     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.

Yours in service to both the Societies of which I am a member-
(Friend) Honour Horne-Jaruk, R.S.F.
Alizaundre de Brebeuf, C.O.L. S.C.A.- AKA Una the wisewoman, or That Pict

"If you're a normal human, the inside of your head is not a pretty
place. Venting it unfiltered to the internet may feel therapeutic,
but it's unlikely to end well."
--Goedjn



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