MARKETING
Mutton and BEEF may be called the Marketer’s Perennials. They are in season all the year round.
In buying mutton see that the fat is clear, very firm and white; the flesh close of grain, and ruddy. Buy your meat fresh, even if you mean to hang it in the cellar for a week—or longer in cold weather. “Begin fair!”
The best cuts of mutton are loin, saddle and leg. French chops are cut from the rib, the fat taken off and several inches of the bone cleaned from meat. They are nice to look at, good to eat—and expensive. You can do the trimming at home when you have once seen it done and save the extra cent or two paid for the word “French.” Loin chops are cheaper and usually more tender and better-flavored.
A more economical piece than the leg for the housewife who does her own marketing is the fore-quarter. You can bone and stuff part of it for a roast; the chops are almost as good as those cut from the loin, and the bones, when removed, make good stock for broth. The meat is really more juicy and sweet than that of the leg, and the cost from two to three cents a pound less.
Lamb is in season from May to November. What is sold under that name in winter is undersized mutton, and usually tough and dry.
Beef—the Englishman’s main-stay—is quite as important in the American kitchen. Seek, in purchasing, for rosy, red meat, “shot” with cream-colored suet, dry and mealy, and a good outer coat of fat. Press the meat hard with the tip of your thumb. If it be flabby, and, after yielding to pressure, retains the dent, let it alone.
The rib roast is a choice cut. It is more comely when the bones are removed, the meat rolled and bound into a round. In which case insist upon having the trimmings sent home. You pay for them, and, when you order soup-meat, for that as well. Have the bones cracked, buy one pound of coarse lean beef for perhaps ten cents, and you have foundation for a good gravy soup, or stock enough for several hashes and stews.
The round costs about two-thirds as much as a rib-roast and half as much as a sirloin, and serves admirably for à la mode beef, or a pot-roast.