At the end of The Pagoda, Miss Sylvie is beginning to fade away both mentally and physically, and no doctor can figure out what’s ailing her. Lowe decides to send a letter to Miss Sylvie’s son from her previous marriage, hoping that rekindling that relationship will bring some life back. But Lowe didn’t know how stiff the relationship between the two were. When he arrived, Miss Sylvie’s son, LeRoy, was served curried mutton and rice. I wanted to talk about mutton for this weekly post.
Mutton comes from the Latin word multo, which meant a male sheep. This confused me at first, because I thought lamb was sheep meat. As it turns out, both lamb and mutton refer to meat from a sheep. The difference is if the sheep was older than a year old, the meat is referred to as mutton. If the sheep was younger, then it’s lamb. Which then lead me to another question; why do we eat lamb more than mutton in the United States?
For starters, mutton costs more, both in terms of price and time. You have to take care of the sheep for a longer time to get mutton, and once you get that meat, you have to cook it for a longer time so the meat isn’t tough. In addition, during WWII American soldiers were given canned Australian mutton. By the time they got home, they were sick of the food, and some even went so far as to ban mutton in their homes! But most notably, mutton is not as popular in the U.S. due to a series of fights known as the Sheep and Cattle Wars. In the late 1800s, sheep herders were mostly Native American, while cattle herders were those supported by the national government. There was competition over getting land for these animals to graze, and in these conflicts, many of the sheep herders and the sheep were killed. When I started researching mutton, I had no idea I would come across another instance of injustice against Native Americans not taught in school.
The Pagoda pgs. 203-206
https://www.thespruceeats.com/the-difference-between-lamb-and-mutton-2356034
https://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/ingredients/article/the-history-of-lamb-and-mutton-inspired-by-the-campaign-for-wool
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/11/26/781652195/after-wwii-mutton-fell-out-of-favor-in-the-u-s-can-it-make-a-comeback
Hey Leah, thanks for clueing us into what “mutton” actually is! I had no idea that there even is a distinction between the two types of meat from a sheep, much less its fraught history. I don’t think I’ve ever even had mutton, I wonder if it’s going to come back into “fashion” soon! If it does, I hope there is some acknowledgment of how Native Americans were treated in its food geneology.
When I think about mutton, I usually think of it as “old-timey.” It’s disappointing to discover that the reason we don’t eat it today isn’t because of food trends, but deliberate sabotage.
I never knew about the Sheep and Cattle Wars. Like Nikki said above, I thought that Americans didn’t eat sheep just because of preference. I thought maybe sheep and goats are not as bountiful in America as they are in other places around the world, so I attributed the lack of sheep dishes in the U.S. to that. It’s another shake of reality that the education system doesn’t give us the full truth.