Mutton ^(Myth)

One of the more memorable scenes in the 1975 TV movie, The Legend of Lizzie Borden, is the scene in which Andrew Borden insists his family sit at the dining table and partake from a tureen of rotting mutton soup over which flies buzz. “Waste not, want not,” says the character of Andrew before he and Abby begin enthusiastically scooping the rancid stew into their mouths. In the movie, the character of Lizzie wisely abstains from the meal. It is a scene clearly meant to establish how miserable Lizzie’s life had become under her father’s thumb as well as to help explain why she may have “snapped” and gone on the murderous rampage depicted at the movie’s end.

The screenwriter who came up with that scene may have invented the fly-attracting foulness of the meat, but he didn’t draw the idea from nowhere. For decades, it was repeated again and again that the family had been forced by penny-pinching Andrew to eat nothing but mutton-gone-bad for as many as five days in a row. Why five days? According to Edmund Pearson, who cited a 1934 article written by Arthur Phillips for the Sunday Standard Times of New Bedford, “The mutton had first appeared at the table, in the form of a roast leg, on the preceding Saturday.” (Arthur Phillips was a young lawyer who worked with Lizzie’s defense team and asserted in a later book that a “leg of lamb first cooked on the Saturday before the murders was on the table in disguised form five days later.”) Other accounts insist Bridget first served mutton on Sunday, but as Sunday was her day off, she likely cooked it the day before.

It is unclear how the story grew into such exaggerated mutton-at-every-meal proportions when according to the testimony of Bridget Sullivan, the menu on Tuesday, two days before the murders, did not feature any mutton at all, but swordfish for both dinner and supper (a likely culprit for the Bordens’ supposed bout with food poisoning that evening). Wednesday morning, she served “pork steaks” for breakfast. But on Wednesday, the day before the murders, Bridget did indeed serve “cold mutton” and “warmed over mutton broth” for the noon-day meal and for supper as well. She prepared it again for breakfast on Thursday, the morning of the murders, and was told by Abby to expect to serve it again for the noon meal that day. The food writer MFK Fisher would later venture, “with the temperature well into the eighties at the breakfast hour, it may have served not only as requisite fare but as a kind of gastronomical catalyst for whatever strange, passionate killings were soon to take place.” (The comment was clearly meant to entertain and not serious conjecture, as Lizzie testified she did not eat any breakfast that morning, and claimed to rarely do so.)

Certainly, mutton served for consecutive meals for even just 24 hours sounds unappetizing to our modern expectation of something new and different at every meal; yet, one would expect that in the days before refrigeration it was common to use up what meat one had available before it went bad. The Bordens did have an ice box which was supplied with fresh ice daily, but that could extend the life of food for only so long.

Perhaps it was the obvious challenge of preserving leftover meat in 1892 that eventually led to a widespread belief that it was rancid mutton kept too long that caused the Bordens to become sick on Tuesday evening, just 36 hours before the murders. But as the family ate that mutton several times on Wednesday without ill effects, it was certainly not the lamb meat that caused them to be ill. If they had developed food poisoning as their family doctor, Seabury Bowen, suspected, then it was likely from the warmed-over swordfish Bridget said she served for supper on Tuesday. Although, as Victoria Lincoln pointed out, because Bridget became sick on Thursday morning, there is an equally good chance it was simply a stomach virus that was moving its way through the household. “Infectious gastrointestinal complaints were not recognized in Abby’s lifetime,” Lincoln wrote. “Whether a family fell sick in unison or one after the other, it was always ‘something you ate’.”

In the end, the oft-derided mutton became a topic of amusement at Lizzie’s trial when Bridget Sullivan took the stand. According to a Fall River Daily Herald article of June 8th, 1893, “A smile played about the lips of Miss Sullivan whenever any reference was made to the component parts of the meals served at the Borden house. She laughed at the mutton, and cold mutton and mutton broth, just as others have laughed at the same thing.” It was also reported that as Lizzie listened to Bridget’s recounting of the menu, she also couldn’t resist the hint of a smile.