mutton
/ˈmʌt(ə)n
/- Beef, mutton, pork and venison were common meats, and communities close to the coast could expect to widen their diets with fish and shellfish.
- The dinner would consist of roast beef, roast mutton, roast pork, and vegetables, plum puddings, Christmas cake, and tea, and would be served to about 1,200 poor people.
- The document reveals that the bishop's menu would have included a range of meats, from mutton and beef to veal, geese, rabbit, duck and lamb.
Phrases
(as) dead as mutton
mutton dressed as lamb
Derivatives
muttony
- Surrounded as it is by cool temperatures, the tail can be home to a substantial slab of fat with a texture somewhat like bacon, though of course with a muttony aroma.
- Lamb karahi was cubes of lean almost muttony meat, tender but not invalid food soft, smothered in a rich red sauce.
- The taste of fish has been left behind in the stock, leaving an intense, dry muttony meat thronged with fugitive flavours that escape identification.
Origin
Middle English: from Old French moton, from medieval Latin multo(n-), probably of Celtic origin; compare with Scottish Gaelic mult, Welsh mollt, and Breton maout.
A word that came from French but which is probably Celtic in origin and related to Scottish Gaelic mult and Welsh mollt. Mutton is technically the meat of sheep more than a year old The insult mutton dressed as lamb describes an older person dressed in a style suitable for somebody much younger. There is a long tradition of using mutton of women in a derogatory way. It was used as a slang term for prostitutes from the early 16th century, and the phrase to hawk your mutton meant ‘to flaunt your sexual attractiveness’ or, of a prostitute, ‘to solicit for clients’. Muttonhead was used as a term for a stupid person of either sex from the beginning of the 19th century, and this is probably the source of mutt (late 19th century) for both a stupid person and a dog. See also beef