Maybe it was a Dickensian waifs' workhouse experience?
Okay, everybody and their dog has already taken a rotted codfish to this: Beyond Porridge and Boiled Mutton: A Taste of London, with its assumption that only in the last few years has cuisine in the Great Metroplz heaved itself out of a Dickensian mire - indeed, we wonder if the writer did his research in London's Pulse, which would suggest far worse things than boiled mutton (which was probably not even mutton...).
I did wonder if perchance Mr Draper had gone to Heston Blumenthal's Dinner and mistaken his careful and probably utterly delicious recreation of some dish from British culinary history as standard London resto fare? - because I can just about imagine some dish that was listed as 'porridge and boiled mutton' in a C17th cookery book featuring on the menu there.
But even if we do not go back to the period of London dining described by Lt-Col Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, Dinners and Diners: Where and How to Dine in London (1899), the period when London dining got out of its trough of post-war austerity and gloom was, I depose, round about the 1960s.
I'd really be quite intrigued to know where Mr Draper was served mutton, which is by no means commonly found on menus - there used to be a Moroccan place in Kentish Town, long since defunct, which did a couscous with mutton chop, and I think I've recently once or twice seen hogget on menus.
Maybe it was on offer as part of a reconstructed Victorian workhouse experience? After all, it would more or less approximate to skilly, a weak broth of oatmeal and water in which salt meat had been boiled.
And on the subject of Victorian reconstructions, this gave me to think hmmm? and WTF: The Victorian School - I think it's actually a perfectly genuine site of useful historical resources on Victorian schooling, but that particular page made me blink as being of somewhat specialist interest. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2807819.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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