Boiling meat Iron Age style

Some of my collection of food books are on the history of food and cooking and I've been meaning to try more of the recipes for ages.

Mr 13 came home from the local farm butcher with half a leg of mutton  which we eat occasionally. You can't get it from supermarkets as  apparently we prefer to ship in lambs from the other side of the world but if you can hold of it it's definitely worth trying. Not tough and stringy as we've been led to believe, but tasty and it has the benefit of having had a life. If we're going to eat meat I want to know where it's come from and how it's lived. Hogget is good too, halfway between mutton and lamb.
I decided this was a perfect opportunity to try a prehistoric recipe, boiled mutton in grass.

To my husband's credit he didn't flinch too much when I said I was going to boil it. Anyone read Asterix? The Ancient Britons only ate boiled meat (with mint sauce) and drank warm beer. Appetising.

Asterix in Britain 

Well, an experimental archaelogist called Jacqui Woods has researched British cookery from prehistory onwards and in Tasting the Past  she describes how the Celts (2000+ years ago, pre-Roman invasion) would boil meat in tubs or pits in the ground filled with water heated with stones from the fire (be careful when choosing stones to heat in the fire as some can explode). The meat would be wrapped in grass and leaves to protect it from ash and grit.
Building a water pit is on my to do list but for now I cooked it on the stove.

I pulled up some long grass from my oh-so-tidy garden. I did contemplate adding in some stalks of mint but decided to stick with the grass for the first time. It made the wrapping easier later if I held all the grass tips up, roots down. I cut off any roots I pulled up so I wasn't cooking the meat in soil soup.
I arranged some strings in across a plate in both directions and then covered that with a thick layer of grass. I put the joint on top of that.

I added a second layer over the top of the meat and brought round the horizontal/weft strings and tied them. A slip knot worked best here, especially if you don't have a handy spare finger to hold the knot whilst you're tying.

I covered the ends with the last of the grass, across this time and then tied the vertical/warp strings tightly. 

It fitted snugly in my biggest cast iron pot. I covered it with water, brought it up to a low boil and left it to simmer for a couple of hours. I added some inauthentic carrot, celery and salt as I thought the resulting stock would make some nice soup. I turned it once as it wasn't totally immersed in the water and topped it up with water from the kettle once.

Telling when it was done was slightly tricky but lamb and mutton can be safely undercooked so it's not too crucial. I prodded it a bit to make sure it was firm and not squashy and then inserted a thin knife to check the centre was hot.

Somebody thinks it smells good...

It smelt (and tasted) amazing but didn't look appealing by modern standards (and possibly not Iron Age Britons either, the book says it would be crisped by the fire or on hot stones) so I finished it in a hot oven with the roast vegetables.

Sorry, no instagram worthy photos of it cooked but it was delicious. Really good. All the meat eaters in the family loved it, even my son ('Dad, what are you letting Mum do to our dinner?') I'll certainly be doing it again, hopefully in the garden. I'll add some herbs along with the grass next time too. And if you can't get mutton, lamb would be fine as you can see from the recipe, as would beef or chicken I think.

We ate some of the leftovers with boiled spring greens (cabbage) and onion sauce, about as cliched a bad English cooking combination as you can get but that was also absolutely delicious. I added a few caraway seeds to the sauce. I think the English have been happy with badly cooked, poor quality food for too long, and that's the problem rather than our culinary history.