5.2: Lamb & Mutton – Completed!

Last year, I cooked my 447th recipe from Jane Grigson’s English Food (3rd edition). It was the superlative #447 Roast Saddle of Lamb, the last of the 16 recipes in the Lamb & Mutton section of the Meat, Poultry & Gamechapter.

#447 *Roast Saddle of Lamb*. My carving skills are certainly improved since I started this project!

The recipes aren’t being cooked at a particularly fast rate anymore because the ingredients are either difficult to find or are expensive to buy (or both). There are just three recipes left to cook from the whole book. If you are wondering, these are: Roach, Elvers in the Gloucester Style and Ptarmigan!

Looking back at the recipes that make up the Lamb & Mutton section, it occurred to me how formative they were – from both a personal and professional point of view. First of all, the vast majority of dishes were very highly received, and easily the highest scoring section of the Meat, Poultry & Game chapter (see the stats section below), and bearing in mind lamb had been pooh-poohed by my family as greasy, fatty and of bad flavour, I wasn’t exactly primed to enjoy this batch of recipes.

Possibly the goriest recipe in the book! #333 *Lamb’s Head with Barley & Brain* *Sauce*

Several years into the Neil Cooks Grigson project, when I had my burgeoning food business (The Buttery), I decided I should have a go at doing my own pop-up restaurant in my house,[1] I took inspiration from these recipes for the main course: the centrepiece was a boned saddle of lamb[2] with the blueberry sauce from #440 Primitive Lamb with Blueberry Sauce plus #379 Kidneys in their Fat as a garnish.

A few years later when The Buttery had become a proper bricks-and-mortar establishment, I revisited #188 Ragoût of Lamb and got it on the menu, and it went down very well indeed.

An English classic: #143 *Boiled Leg of Lamb with Caper Sauce*

The star recipe was discovered whilst puzzling over a menu for a private catering job. I decided to cook #404 Lamb (or Mutton) to Eat like Venison: a leg of lamb long-marinated in red wine and red wine vinegar, so that the meat was extremely tender and tasted like the best venison you’ve ever eaten in your whole entire life. Astounding stuff. Other recipes to score full marks were #438 Plain Roast Primitive Lamb with Gravy and #400 Crown Roast of Lamb.

I also got the opportunity to discover some ingredients and dishes I probably never would have tried in other circumstances: the two primitive lamb recipes, the delicious combination of lamb and laverbread, and the rather challenging #333 Lamb’s Head and Barley, with Brain Sauce, which tasted good, and helped me to ditch my own prejudices regarding this sort of humble cookery.

The Lamb & Mutton section, then, was a great success and a source of inspiration, but what was Jane’s opinion of lamb and mutton in England whilst she was writing and updating English Food in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s? Typically, it’s a mix of praise and frustration. Indeed, she opens the section thus: ‘First-class lamb has become a problem in England since the importation of cheap, refrigerated New Zealand lamb made it a meat for the most homely occasions…Nowadays I sometimes conclude that our best lamb all goes to France’. But Jane is not totally filled with pessimism, adding ‘[h]owever, perseverance and a certain obstinacy should lead you to a butcher who can supply local or at least very good English lamb.’ Her favourite was actually Welsh mountain lamb. She also gives a special mention to the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, not just for saving breeds of sheep on the brink of extinction, but for making them economically viable to farm and sell. I echo this gratitude.

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The Stats

When I complete a section or a chapter of the book I like to give you the stats for the section. So here goes with Lamb & Mutton: in short it has been the most popular part of the Meat, Poultry & Game chapter with a mean score of 8.47 and a median of 8.5. Most interesting, though, is that it has a mode of 10 – the only other category to receive full marks for its modal score is Stuffings.

Below, I have listed the recipes in the order they appear in the book with links to my posts with their individual scores, so have a gander. It is worth pointing out, that my posts are no substitute for Jane’s wonderful writing, so if you don’t own a copy of English Food, I suggest you get yourself one.

#447 Roast Saddle of Lamb 9.5/10

#299 Leg of Lamb Stuffed with Crab 7/10

#404 Lamb (or Mutton) to Eat like Venison 10/10

#188 Ragoût of Lamb 7.5/10

#143 Boiled Leg of Mutton (or Lamb) with Caper Sauce 7.5/10

#243 Spiced Welsh Mutton ‘Ham’ 8.5/10

#191 Lamb with Plums 8/10

#175 Shoulder of Lamb with Rice and Apricot Stuffing 9/10

#440 Primitive Lamb with Blueberry Sauce 9.5/10

#438 Plain Roast Primitive Lamb with Gravy 10/10

#353 Roast Rack of Lamb with Laverbread 9/10

#305 Guard of Honour 8.5/10

#400 Crown Roast of Lamb 10/10

#115 Lancashire Hot-Pot 6.5/10

#333 Lamb’s Head and Barley, with Brain Sauce 6.5/10

#379 Kidneys in their Fat 8.5/10

Notes

[1] There would be 10 pop ups in all as well as several ‘Pud Clubs’. I shoved all my furniture upstairs and brought in tables and chairs. For my efforts, I was nominated for a Manchester Food & Drink Award. They were exciting times.

[2] Because it was boned, I didn’t count the roast saddle of lamb recipe to be officially ticked off – Jane is very clear that a saddle of lamb should be cooked on the bone.

#447 Roast Saddle of Lamb

It’s been two years since I last posted a recipe on here! I can only apologise. This recipe really should have been cooked long ago. There were two reasons I put it off: First, according to Jane, the gargantuan joint feeds 10 to 12 people, and comes in at a weighty 9–12 lbs / 4 ½ -6 kilos. I have done many Jane Grigson-themed dinner parties in the past, but never one that could feed 12. That said, I did cook a saddle of lamb for my very first pop-up restaurant in 2013, but that was off the bone and dressed for easy carving. For this recipe, Jane insists upon bone-in. The second reason was that I assumed the cut she describes was too arcane. She tells us ‘[t]he butcher will have prepared the saddle by slitting the tail and curving it over, with the two kidneys between the tail pieces and the saddle.’ She goes on: ‘for this kind of high-class butchery it is wise to go to an experienced man of mature years and if his father was a butcher before him, so much the better.’

I asked several butchers, and they all thought it odd I was asking for a saddle on the bone, and none quite understood Jane’s description.

Frustrated that I couldn’t get a handle on Jane’s description, I hit the books. The Constance Spry Cookery Book (1956) tells us a saddle of lamb is made of the ‘two loins together from ribs to tail.’ Going back in time a few decades, Charles Francatelli (1907) describes no fewer than six recipes for saddle of lamb, all of which ask for a boned, rolled saddle. He does mention a baron of lamb made up of back, rumps and tops of legs, which seems too far the other way! Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) doesn’t describe the joint, but it does tell us that ‘the joint is very much in vogue’. There is an illustration, but it is so small in my first edition transcription that it is of little use. Lastly, Eliza Acton, writing in 1845, provides a recipe but again provides no explanation of the meat itself – everyone is assuming we all know what a saddle of lamb should look like, it seems.

I settled upon ordering a saddle from Hopkinson’s of Lymm, a great butcher who talked me through the butchering process. The tail piece wasn’t there, but that’s okay. It would serve eight looking at it, and that was the number of folk I would be feeding, so I was very happy.

The missing piece – the saddle of lamb as shown in Sheila Hutchins’ *English Recipes* (1967)

It was only after I had cooked the joint and started researching for this post that I found some more information, and it was with the pages of Sheila Hutchins’ English Recipes (1967) that I had a eureka moment, because there is a lovely, clear illustration of the joint. Rats! It’s always the way. She also tells us that ‘[t]his epicurean dish used to appear at almost every Victorian and Edwardian banquet’, but ‘inevitably’ became a middle-class aspiration.

Going by this new evidence, I was happy that my saddle was essentially a neatened and slightly over-trimmed version of the joint Jane wanted us to cook.

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And so, I cooked the saddle for three Grigson dinner party stalwarts: Nic Alden, Simone Blagg and Anthea Craig. There were eight of us in all – a huge thank you to Simone for hosting the meal. My teeny flat couldn’t hold more than four people! Have a listen to this podcast episode about past Grigson dinner parties to hear us discussing the low and high points of parties past:

To roast the lamb, first preheat the oven to 190°C. Then, rub all over with salt, pepper and thyme leaves. If you like, insert thin slivers of garlic into the meat, and then brush it with a little melted butter.

Now I didn’t follow Jane’s exact cooking instructions because my joint was lighter than the one she described. If yours does weigh in at her size, roast it for 2½ hours, basting it with a quarter of a pint of port or red wine. Keep basting with the wine and juices every 30 minutes or so. Then, in the final 30 minutes, dredge it with a scattering of flour and dribble on a little more melted butter.

My joint weighed in at 2 kg, so I did the same as Jane describes, except for two things: because the joint wouldn’t be in the oven as long, I preheated it to 230°C, roasted it for twenty minutes, and then turned it down to 190°C, and roasted it for 1 ¼ hours. As it turned out, it was perhaps in the oven too long, because there was just the merest sign of pinkness. Sixty or sixty-five minutes would have been better to suit my tastes.

Remove the meat from the oven and keep warm as you prepare the gravy: make a roux by cooking an ounce of butter in a saucepan until it turns golden brown, then stir in a tablespoon of flour. Mix and cook the roux out for a few minutes, then pour in the cooking juices (skim away the fat first). Deglaze the roasting pan with ¾ pint of lamb stock – made either from the trimmings or from a good preparatory brand – and add to the gravy. Add the liquids in stages to avoid lumps. Season with salt and pepper. Strain into a gravy jug.

Carving the saddle was easy: I cut down the sides of the backbone and then the ribs, pulling away the carved meat with one hand, keeping it taut, making for easier cuts against the ribs. Then it was a simple case of slicing it up.

I also served it with Jane’s excellent blueberry sauce.

#447 Roast Saddle of Lamb. What a delicious piece of meat! I’ve cooked racks of lamb several times now, but roasting them in one large piece like this was quite something – one thing I have learned is that the tenderest roasts are made with the large pieces of meat. I heartily recommend roasting a saddle of lamb on the bone. The only issue was that I slightly overcooked it (to my taste at least). I therefore will knock off half a mark: 9.5/10.

References

Acton, E. (1845) Modern Cookery For Private Families. Quadrille.

Beeton, I. (1861) The Book of Household Management. Lightning Source.

Francatelli, C.E. (1906) The Modern Cook. Macmillan and Co. Ltd.

Grigson, J. (1992) English Food. Third Edit. Penguin.

Hutchins, S. (1967) English Recipes, and others from Scotland, Wales and Ireland as they appeared in eighteenth and nineteenth century cookery books and now devised for modern use. Cookery Book Club.

Spry, C. and Hume, R. (1956) The Constance Spry Cookery Book. Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

#440 Primitive Lamb with Blueberry Sauce

Here’s the second of the two recipes in English Food that uses primitive lamb. Regular followers will know that I acquired two legs of Hebridean hogget earlier this year. A hogget is a sheep that’s too old to be lamb, but not yet considered mutton. It was wonderful to go to the farm and chat with Helen, the farmer who works so hard to keep this rare and primitive breed alive and kicking. Here’s the episode of my Lent podcast that included my interview with her :

Primitive breeds such as the Hebridean need help: help from specialist farmers and help from us, because they won’t survive if there is no demand. Primitive breeds are excellent for the smallholder – they are small and easy lambers, meaning their husbandry is much less stressful than large commercial breeds with their giant lambs! They have great character too: they are brighter and are excellent foragers that display more natural behaviours. If I ever get a bit of land, I will definitely be getting myself a little flock.

In that episode we focus on the one breed, but I thought I’d give a mention to the other primitive breeds just in case you are thinking about getting hold of some. Aside from the Hebridean there are the Soay, Manx Loaghtan, Shetland, Boreray and North Ronaldsay. They all belong to the Northern European short-tailed group, and they were probably brought to the Outer Hebridean islands by Norse settlers. They are small, very woolly and extremely hardy sheep. The islands upon which they were found were the St Kilda archipelago, and had been there since the Iron Age. Some moved and adapted, the Manx Loaghtan obviously went to the Isle of Man, but some remained on the islands and adapted too. The North Ronaldsay, for example, lives on the small rocky northernmost islands and has become a seaweed-grazing specialist.

Of all the breeds, the Soay sheep are considered to be the most like their ancestors, and it is found on several islands in the archipelago. On the island of Herta, a feral population of around 1500 was discovered; their name is befitting because Soay is Norse for sheep island.

A plane’s view of the islands (pic: Flying Fish World)

This recipe is exactly the same as the other one except the lamb is served with a blueberry sauce rather than a gravy. Although we are at the tail-end of the blog, I actually made this sauce for my first ever pop up restaurant all the way back in 2013 which took place in my little terraced house – a lot has happened since then, that’s for sure! It sounded so delicious I couldn’t wait until I found some primitive lamb. The usual fruit to serve with lamb is of course the tart redcurrant, usually in jelly form. Blueberries are usually sweeter than currants, but Jane is not daft and makes up for it with the addition of a vinegar syrup.

And, if you are thinking this is some kind of American abomination, don’t be so sure: although all of the blueberries we buy in shops are undoubtably American varieties, don’t forget its close relative, the more humble blaeberry, which I suspect is what the lamb would have been served with. It’s appeared in the blog before, and scored full marks: #xxx Blaeberry Pie

Anyway, enough waffle: here’s what to do:

Roast the lamb or hogget as described for #438 Plain Roast Primitive Lamb with Gravy, but instead of making the gravy start to make this blueberry sauce as it roasts:

In a saucepan simmer eight ounces of blueberries with ¼ pint of dry white wine, ¼ pint of lamb stock and a tablespoon of caster sugar. Remove a couple of dozen of the best berries for the garnish and blitz the remainder in a blender and pass through a sieve.

Dissolve 2 teaspoons of sugar in 6 tablespoons of white wine vinegar in a small saucepan and boil down until quite syrupy, then add to the blended berries along with some finely chopped mint or rosemary. Set aside and return to it when the roast had been taken out of the oven.

Skim any fat from the meat juices and pour them into the blueberry sauce. Reheat and add some lemon juice – I used a little shy of half a lemon here – and then season with salt and pepper, and even sugar if needed. When ready pour into a sauce boat, not forgetting to add in the reserved berries.

#440 Primitive Lamb with Blueberry Sauce. Well you won’t be surprised that this was, again, delicious, how could it not be? I did a better job of roasting it this time I feel. I really enjoyed the blueberry sauce and it went very well with the slightly gamey meat. I think I may have preferred the plain gravy to the blueberries though, but there’s not much in it. Because of this doubt, I am scoring it a very solid 9.5/10

P.S. The leftovers made an excellent #84 Shepherd’s Pie.

Refs:

‘British Rare & Traditional Sheep Breeds’ The Accidental Smallholder website: www.accidentalsmallholder.net/livestock/sheep/british-rare-and-traditional-sheep-breeds/

‘Soay’ RBST website www.rbst.org.uk/soay

‘Manx Loaghtan’ RBST website www.rbst.org.uk/manx-loaghtan

‘Hebridean Sheep Characteristics & Breeding Information’ Roy’s Farm website: www.roysfarm.com/hebridean-sheep

‘About Shetlands’ North American Shetland Sheepbreeders’ Association website: www.shetland-sheep.org/about-shetlands/

‘The Origins of Registered Boreray Sheep’, Sheep of St Kilda website: www.soayandboreraysheep.com/

‘Boreray’ RBST website: www.rbst.org.uk/boreray-sheep-25

‘North Ronaldsay’ RBST website: www.rbst.org.uk/north-ronaldsay

#400 Crown Roast of Lamb

Well, well, well. Here we are at #400! Who would have thought I’d get this far?

I’ve chosen this classic piece of meat sculpture for this milestone as it is such a special thing, and hardly seen these days. Plus, doing it Jane’s way means you don’t simply pop to the butcher’s shop and ask for the roast assembled and oven-ready. No, Jane’s way means constructing it yourself; something I really could not have done at the beginning of this project. This saves you a lot of money, and earns you plenty of kudos with your friends.

I did a quick look through some old books and it is odd that this classic and ancient and slightly macabre dish does not seem to appear before the 20^th Century. I must be wrong here – can anyone shed any light on it?

To make your own rack of lamb, you will need three things: your lamb, stuffing and a trussing needle & thread.

First, the stuffing: go for any of the stuffing recipes in the Stuffings section of thelast chapter, or go with the stuffing recipe from #175 Shoulder of Lamb with Rice and Apricot Stuffing. I chose the latter.

Ok, now the tricky bit. Go to your butcher and ask for a whole best end of neck; it is from this that you will get your two, perfectly symmetrical, racks. You should get 7-8 cutlets from each rack. Here’s what you ask the butcher to do (in Jane’s own words):

to divide in two down backbone so you have two symmetrical pieces,
to chine it [this means to remove the backbone],
to make small cuts between the cutlet bones [this is quite simple to do yourself].

The butcher will desperately try to chop off the long bones and you must insist he does not! At home, you can get the racks prepped by French trimming the thin ends; scraping away the fat from the ribs, just like#305 Guard of Honour. It’s quite laborious at first, but you’ll soon get the knack.

Sit the two racks back-to-back with the fatty sides touching. Take your trussing needle and sew the ends together with two stiches, making sure the thread is tied good and tight.

Stand it up and shape it into a crown using your fist – this is where those little cuts the butcher made are important. Cover the ends with foil and sit the whole thing on a rack in a foil-lined roasting pan. Season the meat (especially the fat) and fill the centre with your chosen stuffing.

Roast for 75 minutes at 190⁰C. Remove from the oven, cover with foil and let the meat rest for 20 minutes or so. If you want to be posh remove the foil from the ribs and replace with paper ruffles.

But what to serve with roast lamb? Don’t fear, Grigson has it all covered for us in this post.

#400 Crown Roast of Lamb. What a spectacle this was! I loved the way it looked; not all nice and neat with each rib the same length, but instead the bones were their natural varied lengths, making it look even more like a real crown. The stuffing was, of course, great and the meat itself wonderfully tender and medium rare. A surprising thing bearing in mind it had been a roasting for what seemed like a long time. The only minor thing is that the stuffing began to char, so I would recommend covering it with some foil for the first half of the roasting. Nevertheless, still marvellous. 10/10.

#353 Roast Rack of Lamb with Laverbread

A second post involving the Welsh speciality laverbread; a deep green gelatinous sauce made from well-stewed seaweed known locally as laver (see the previous post). I still had some left over for this recipe which I made for my friend Charlotte – a veteran of my cooking, poor woman – as it was her birthday and luckily she requested lamb.

This is a recipe that I couldn’t do when I was in America because what you don’t want are nice pre-butchered racks, but a whole best end of neck. This is the upper part of the back and ribs that sequesters the beautifully tender lamb cutlets. If you can, wait until the lamb are a little older; these muscles don’t do much work so they don’t have as much flavour as, say, leg. Older animals have worked a bit longer so there is some make up in the flavour department. Also, they’re much bigger so you get more meat in your best end of neck.

Anyways, ask the butcher for one best end of neck, then ask him (or her) to split it down the centre, removing the backbone. Take the meat home, including the bones that he removed and you paid for!

Now prepare the lamb ready for roasting by cutting away any fat and meat from the ribs, don’t go too far down – maybe and inch and a half at the wider end and an inch at the thin end.

You should end up with two racks that can be propped up against each other with bones interlacing like fingers. Now take a clove of garlic and slice it thinly. Make holes down the fatty sides of the racks with a very sharp pointy knife and slot a sliver of garlic in each one. Season the lamb all over and put it in a roasting tin so that the ribs criss-cross.

Cover the exposed bones with a piece of foil so that they do not burn. Roast the lamb for 45 minutes at 220⁰C (425⁰F) for pink lamb, going up to 60 minutes for well-done (though cooking it well done would be a travesty in my humble opinion).

Next, make the gravy by first making a lamb stock from the bones and trimmings (this bit can be done well in advance). Add them to a saucepan with a carrot and a tomato both roughly chopped, a pint of beef stock and some salt and pepper. Bring to a simmer and let it tick away for a couple of hours or more if you can. Pass through a sieve and cool. Remove the floating fat and return to the pan with a glass of white wine or vermouth. Reduce until you get a well-flavoured stock. Lastly, slake a tablespoon of cornflour with a little cold water and stir into the stock to produce a nice gravy.

When the lamb is ready, take it out of the oven and cover with foil and let it rest whilst you make the laverbread sauce. Melt 3 ounces of butter in a saucepan and add a pound of laverbread. When hot, stir I the juice of 1 lemonand 2 oranges. Season with salt and pepper.

Place the lamb in the centre of a serving dish, pouring any juices in the gravy. Pour the sauce around the edges of the lamb and then decorate with thinly sliced oranges.

#353 Roast Rack of Lamb with Laverbread. Well the meat (which I cooked pink) was absolutely delicious, tender and well-flavoured. I wasn’t sure about the laverbread at first – it not being cut by the bland oatmeal like in the previous recipe – but I soon got used to it. The taste is very strong, but when eaten with the lamb you can see why they are eaten together so often. The gravy too was excellent; mild and not in the slightest bit greasy as lamb gravy can so often be. 9/10

#305 Guard of Honour

For the meaty part of the dinner party I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I thought I would attempt a Guard of Honour. For those of you not in the know, a Guard of Honour is an attractive way of presenting roast rack of lamb by taking two racks and sitting them upon a roasting tray so the rib bones ‘bristle like a military row of crossed stakes’. The Guard can then be stuffed if you like. Jane likes, as this recipe includes the herb stuffing that I have made a few times now.

I did a little research on this dish, assuming it would be a very old one, but was surprised to find that I could only find relatively contemporary recipes, with none cropping up even in the nineteenth century. Odd.

Griggers recommends buying a whole best end of neck of lamb and to ask the butcher to split it in two down the backbone and to get it chined between each rib so that you can carve the joint easily later. To chine is to cut the backbone. If this wasn’t done, you’d have some thick bits of bone to wrestle with. Ask him to leave on the long bones of the ribs. This part is a rather difficult thing to achieve in America for a couple of reasons. First, the joint called a best end of neck means nothing and second, lamb is generally imported from New Zealand and pre-butchered, at least in part. It’s quite easy though to get hold of a couple of matching racks and to simply not have the extra-long bones.

To make a Guard of Honour, take your two racks of lamb and scrape the skin and fat from the very thin part of the chops to expose the bones, then score the fat on the chops and rub in salt, pepper and rosemary or thyme into it (I went with thyme). Stand the joints up and allow the ribs to cross over each other. Fix them in place with skewers. The cavity within can then be filled with herb stuffing. I found the easiest way to do this was to turn the joint upside down, opening it up, so that the most stuffing possible could be added. (Thanks for taking the photos, Joan!)

Turn it the right way up and press the sides together gently, scraping away any escaped bit of stuffing. Check the security of your skewers and place on a roasting tin.

Roast in a preheated oven for 1 ½ hours at 190°C (375°F). Note that this means that the meat will be well-done.

The meat can be carved, after a period of resting, nice and neatly, giving two chops per person.

Serve your roast lamb with any of the trimmings Jane suggests here. She does mention that the stuffed tomatoes recipe goes very well with Guard of Honour, but I wanted to do other things…

#305 Guard of Honour. I really liked this. I did make it because I was in the mood for lamb. Usually I like my lamb pink, but the delicious herb stuffing helped to keep the well-done meat moist and flavourful. I must admit it wasn’t quite as impressive as it should have been because I couldn’t give the precise instructions to the butcher in the preparation of the joint. I think I shall do some of the more tricky lamb recipes back in Blighty. This is only a little complaint of course and the recipe was very good indeed. 8.5/10

Griggers advises us on what to eat with roast lamb….

The next recipe from English Food will be roast lamb. Not as popular as it was as a roast meat these days, but easy to come by. Jane Grigson in her wisdom gives us a list: ‘Things to go with Roast Lamb’. I thought I’d give the list in full. Hopefully as I cook through the Lamb & Mutton section of the Meat, Poultry & Game chapter, I’ll try them all. Some I’ll have to as they are also offical recipes, others I have inadvertantly tried as parts of other dishes and such. Anyways, here’s the list:

Mint sauce (summer)

Redcurrant or medlar jelly (winter)

Laverbread, heated with orange and lemon juice

Young peas and young potatoes cooked with mint

Asparagus

French beans

Spinach

Cauliflower

Purple sprouting broccoli

Chestnuts and Brussels sprouts

Chestnut puree

Onion sauce (2 recipes for that thus far)

Roast potatoes

Mutton and lamb in oil-on-canvas form