I am not sure at which point that I had worked with meat enough to predict when something is not right before the moment occurs when you know it isn’t right. This was certainly one of those times and maybe the first of which that felt more like experience than paranoia. I had such grand plans for a bright mutton terrine, but before the mutton went into the terrine, I knew deep down that the dish would be only half of what I wanted.

Rob at the Butcher & Larder had mutton in the shop and I stopped in to discuss meeting Paul Bertolli (yes in the span of a year, I met Polcyn, Ruhlman, and Bertolli – living in Chicago has many advantages) and, while there, asked about the head. Mutton head is a sight to behold. Quite different than a pig’s head, which looks, frankly, like a pig, mutton head has been stripped of ears and skin and left with crazy, bulbous eyes and crooked black teeth. And little else. This was my first clue.

The second clue happened after I completed cooking the head. I had braised the head for a few hours with water, red wine, oregano, black pepper, rosemary, salt and cumin. Lambiness was in the air, but when I took the pot from the oven and began to pull the remaining meat from the head, there wasn’t that trademark stickiness to it.

Yet I continued to pull the cheeks, peel the tongue and gently remove the brain as the stock from the braise reduced. There wasn’t much meat, maybe a little over a cup, but it was tender and juicy, just not sticky. I added chopped tongue and brain, along with kalamata olives, fresh rosemary, and orange zest as garnishes and scooped the mixture into a terrine topping with reduced stock. I applied 1 quart of yogurt’s worth of weight on the terrine press and let it chill for 3 days in the fridge.

The third clue came when I removed the terrine from its dish and it lacked that certain feeling that a good, solidly put together terrine has, which is dense with a little bit of bounce. This terrine was light and firm, but no heft or bounce. I was concerned, but I followed instructions of wrapping the terrine tightly and slicing with a thin, hot, sharp knife only to have the terrine behave as I knew that it would, but hoped that it would not. It was not crumbly, but it did not slice well.

Making the fact that the natural gelatin was not sufficient to jell-ify the terrine worse, was that the flavor was fantastic. I love lamb and this mutton was assertively lamb-ish, but the orange, rosemary, and kalamata flavors brightened the terrine immensely. It was delicious and such a damned disappointment. Why did I not buy mutton trotters? Would the neck have provided sufficient gelatin? Ugh. So close to an amazing and original terrine with vibrant colors, textures, and flavors, but what I was left with was 2 quarts of delicious mutton stock and essentially a mutton head “salad” that was extremely tasty, but not beautiful. It is one thing to screw up a terrine in a complete failure, it is another to have very decent concept and bad execution.

Nothing to sneeze at, but I felt that thinking it through and listening to my instinct would have gotten the terrine to work. It does not come close to rivaling some of the bigger failures in food projects that I have made and not posted (i.e. the spicy pickled asparagus or the smoked duck and dried cherry sausages which were historically bad), but in this case, I wanted to post. Not only to document how things don’t always work, but how things can go wrong, but not all the way wrong. ”Ideas in progress” could be a category here. This idea will work and I will make it work soon, but it didn’t work this time and it was not a waste. It was strike one. Not wasted money or time because between the stock and the messy terrine, there is more deliciousness than some of the projects that were deemed wildly successful, but there is disappointment because this was close to a massive success, but wasn’t.