The History of Lamb and Mutton, Inspired by The Campaign for Wool
Welcome to Eat Your Words, a column where we get down to the muddy roots of the food words we know and love
(Credit: Sam Dean)
During an afternoon stroll in Bryant Park today, near the Bon Appetit offices, I discovered that the usual crowd of sleepy businessmen hanging out on the lawn had been displaced by a small flock of sheep. The Campaign for Wool, a campaign generally promoting wool and its many uses, had shepherded them there with the financial backing of HRH The Prince of Wales–not being one to look a gift sheep in the mouth, I took this as a royal command to devote today’s Eat Your Words to the history of the sheepy meats.
Americans have two basic words for one animal’s meat (other ex-UK colonies have the additional “hogget,” meaning meat from a slightly older lamb), one from each of the main channels that have shaped the language today.
“Lamb” is the word with a German root, having meant “a wee sheep” in Old English since at least the 8th century A.D. Back then, we still bothered to pronounce a lot of sounds that we lazily slide by these days, so you would have actually buh’d out that B at the end. And for a brief period in the late Middle Ages, the plural of lamb was, like with ox and child, “lambren.”
“Mutton” has the more interesting story, since it first came into the language from French in that wacky Middle English period. If you’re shaky on your British history, it’s good to remember that the Normans (i.e. Northern French Vikings) successfully invaded and took over England in 1066, as memorialized in the Bayeux Tapestry. From then on, French was the language of the fancy people, and the Germanic Old English was the language of the peasants (itself a French word). This linguistic class divide ended up splitting our meat words in two: Old English for the animals (“sheep”), muddily tended by the peasants, and French for the animal’s meat (“mutton”), eaten by the rich.
Mutton ultimately comes from the Latin multo, which was the word for any male sheep. Since the males were more often sent to the slaughter than their milk-producing and lamb-having sisters, the word hopped over to mean “sheep meat” more generally, which is how it made its way to our vocabulary.
If all this talk of invading Frenchmen and edible animals has gotten you both angry and hungry, there’s a great recipe for lamb–that anciently English meat–in our October issue: Braised Lamb Shanks with Gremolata and Baked Polenta.