Roast Mutton and Fortyfolds

Here’s a lovely description of a small farmer’s meal about a hundred and fifty years ago in north Wiltshire (Southwest England).  It occurs in the novel, Amaryllis at the Fair, written by Richard Jefferies in 1887.

Richard Jefferies’ family illustrates the social flux of mid-nineteenth century England. His grandfather had a printing business in London before returning to the country to run the family mill and bakery. He left this small farm to his son, the Mr. Iden of the piece below. At 38 acres, it was sufficiently large that his father employed several men, sufficiently small that he could not make a profit.

Richard Jefferies left home and worked as an author and journalist before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 38.  When Jefferies was born about one in two Britons lived in the city, when he died, the proportion was about two out of three, the highest in the world. His meticulous detailing of English farming during this transition is both fascinating and an invaluable record.

The scene below would have taken place when Jefferies was a boy in the late 1850s or early 1860s. I think it stands by itself so except for a few points of clarification, I make no comments.

That day they had a leg of mutton–a special occasion–a joint to be looked on reverently. Mr. Iden had walked into the town to choose it himself some days previously, and brought it home on foot in a flag basket.*  The butcher would have sent it, and if not, there were men on the farm who could have fetched it, but it was much too important to be left to a second person . . .

There was a good deal of reason in this personal care of the meat, for it is a certain fact that unless you do look after such things yourself, and that persistently, too, you never get it first-rate. For this cause people in grand villas scarcely ever have anything worth eating on their tables. . .

The meat was dark brown, as mutton should be, for if it is the least bit white it is sure to the poor: The grain was short, . . . firm, and yet almost crumbling to the touch; it was full of juicy red gravy, and cut pleasantly, the knife went through it nicely; you can tell good meat directly you touch it with the knife. It was cooked to a turn, and had been done at a wood fire on a hearth: no oven taste, no taint of coal gas or carbon; the pure flame of wood had browned it. Such emanations as there may be from burning logs are odorous of the woodland, of the sunshine, of the fields and fresh air; the wood simply gives out as it burns the sweetness it has imbibed through its leaves from the atmosphere which floats about grass and flowers.  Essences of this order, if they do penetrate the fibres of the meat, add to its flavour a delicate aroma.  Grass-fed meat, cooked at a wood fire, for me. . . .

 Ivan Day has a fine page on roasting mutton over a wood fire.  It’s high time for a revival. With the mutton went fortyfold potatoes, which became very popular in the 1830s, blight resistant, and good tasting.

Mr. Iden had himself grown the potatoes that were placed before him. they were white, floury, without a drop of water in the whole dish of them. they were equal to the finest bread–far, far superior to the bread with which the immense city of London permits itself to be poisoned. . .

“They be forty-folds,”** said Mr. Iden . . .”Look at the gravy go up into um like tea up a knob of sugar.”

The gravy was drawn up among the dry, floury particles of the potatoes as if they had formed capillary tubes.

Although some American potatoes are called floury, they are used for baking and fall apart when boiled.  This kind of floury potato retains its shape, yet soaks up gravies and sauces, unlike the waxy potatoes used for boiling in the States.

“Forty-folds,” he repeated; “they comes forty to one.***  It be an amazing theng how thengs do that. forty grows for one. Thaay be an old-fashioned potato; you won’t find many of thaay, not true forty-folds.”

A basket of forty-folds, which have recently come back on the market with the interest in heritage potatoes. In England you can get them from Carroll’s Heritage Potatoes

And Mr. Iden, always careful about his food, had grown the potatoes himself.

[Mr. Iden]  was busy putting in potatoes . . .The way in which he was planting potatoes was wonderful, every potato was placed at exactly the right distance apart, and a hole made for it in the general trench; before it was set it was looked at and turned over, and the thumb rubbed against it to be sure that it was sound, and when finally put in, a little mould was delicately adjusted round to keep it in position till the whole row was buried . . . All this care was founded upon observation, and arose from very large abilities on the part of the planter, though directed to so humble a purpose at that moment.

*A flag basket is one made of riverside “flags,” a term used for a variety of plants from irises to sedges, and used to carry food to the fields.

**So crucial to farmers to know how much one seed yields. And the Oxford English Dictionary explains that this “Teutonic suffix,” which does derive from folding or pleating, is added to cardinal numbers to indicate the multiplication rate.

Many know it from its frequent use in the King James Bible as in Genesis 26.12. “Then Isaac sowed in that land, and received in the same year an hundredfold: and the LORD blessed him.” He certainly did because wheat yielded about sevenfold in the ancient world.

*** In the novel, Mr Iden switches between Queen’s English and a Wiltshire dialect.  The link will take you to a recording in the British Museum of Wiltshire accents.  I couldn’t find a recording of a really strong dialect.

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