Scots still not convinced by mutton

Defining mutton is a bit of a grey area anyway. Lambs become hoggs after the turn of the year when they are about 8-months-old, and are called shearlings after they are shorn for the first time at about 14-months-old when they start to develop a mutton flavour.

The UK market for mutton dwindled after the Second World War. Many servicemen came home from the war with a bad taste in their mouth from the vast quantities of canned mutton they were fed while abroad, the quality of which was scarcely fit for dogs.

Another reason why mutton went out of fashion was that we needed to import meat after the war ended and lots of mutton was shipped from Australia and New Zealand. The prolonged time in freezers adversely affected the fat, giving the mutton an odd taste.

Over the centuries sheep have been reared mainly for their wool. Ewes produced a crop of lambs each year, and the male lambs were castrated to become wethers. Those wethers would grow a profitable large fleece of wool each year, while the ewes, with the constraints of pregnancy would produce a smaller fleece.

Lambs were rarely eaten as it was more profitable to harvest a crop of wool from a sheep each year, and let it grow into a larger carcase.

In the 1880s the first shipload of New Zealand lamb came to the UK. It was a new concept for the British and was also very expensive. Only the rich had the opportunity to consume lamb, but despite the general public's initial reluctance to eat "baby animals" the product was very successful. During the early 1900s the price of wool collapsed, so more British farmers started selling the male lambs for meat. Improvements in breeding and management also meant a better carcase size was available from lambs. In 1947 the government introduced subsidies to encourage farmers to keep more sheep, but as they were only paid on females the traditional practice of keeping wethers died out.

Eventually most mutton was produced from ewes and rams at the end of their productive lives. It became more viable to produce a lamb for meat in 6 months than keep sheep for at least two years. Being younger meat, lamb was much easier and faster to cook, a boon for the busy housewife, but it did lack some of the great taste and meatier flavours of mutton. If mutton is under-cooked it can be tough and chewy.

Nowadays about 1.8m ewes are culled in the UK every year, with approximately 95 per cent sold through auction marts mostly to be slaughtered in Halal abattoirs. In the UK the average size of a mutton carcase is 25kg compared with 19kg for lambs and approximately one mutton carcase is sold for every six lamb carcases. In other words, about 18 per cent of all sheep-meat produced in the UK is mutton.

The largest share of the mutton market is to Halal customers that include Halla wholesale, Halal butchers and Halal export - mainly to France, but also some to Germany. Huge amounts of mutton go into processing for ready meals, pies, catering and the Doner Kebab market.

In 2004 Prince Charles gave his support for the Mutton Renaissance campaign that gives advice on how to source quality mutton and recommends some ways to cook it. Sadly, although it has managed to sell mutton into some top restaurants, or through farmers' markets, farm shops and quality butchers, the main outlets remain the ethnic communities. Muslims, Sikhs and Jamaicans all prefer mutton to lamb because it is far better suited to their traditional slow cooked recipes.

We Scots only eat about 3kg of lamb per year, less than half that of the average in England, and our mutton consumption is negligible. We produce about 0.5m ewes annually in Scotland, but only 30,000 of them are slaughtered north of the border, with the rest transported south to be killed.

While a skilled butcher can create some great tasting cuts of meat from a well-hung, nicely finished carcase of mutton, it's virtually impossible to pass it off as lamb and even harder to persuade Scots to eat it.