Season 4 pounds of lamb with salt, pepper and lemon-juice; put in the dripping-pan with 2 small chopped onions, 1 bay-leaf, 2 sprigs of parsley and thyme; then pour over ½ cup of butter and dredge with flour. Add a cup of hot water and the juice of a lemon. Let bake in a hot oven until done. Serve with French peas.
A plain pan-roast built for a leg or shoulder, with the flour and butter doing double duty as basting fat and gravy thickener. The vague instruction is "until done," which is where a thermometer earns its keep.
- The cutFour pounds suggests a bone-in half leg or a boned, tied shoulder. Shoulder has more connective tissue and does better at a lower temperature for longer; leg suits the hot oven the recipe calls for.
- "A hot oven"Period cookbooks generally place a hot oven somewhere in the 400-450F range, though the figures vary from book to book and this one gives none. Start near the top of that range for 20 minutes to set the flour crust, then drop to 350F for the remainder rather than holding the highest heat throughout.
- DonenessRoast to an internal temperature of 130-135F at the thickest part for medium-rare, 140-145F for medium, then rest 15 minutes. At 425F reckon on roughly 15 minutes per pound, but the thermometer decides.
- Half a cup of butterThat is 4 oz, generous by modern taste for a joint that renders its own fat. Two ounces is plenty; use the rest of the pan drippings for the sauce.
- The dredgingFlour dusted over buttered meat browns into a crust and thickens the pan liquid as it reduces. Keep the cup of hot water topped up so the flour never scorches, and whisk the pan juices smooth at the end.
- Lemon twiceLemon juice goes on the meat as seasoning and again into the pan. The first is a marinade-style rub best done an hour ahead; the second brightens the gravy and should go in near the end so it does not cook flat.
- French peasPetits pois, small and sweet, traditionally braised with butter, shredded lettuce and a little onion rather than boiled plain. Frozen petits pois are a fair substitute.
- YieldFour pounds bone-in serves six; boned and tied, six to eight.
The book is one of those year-round "a dish a day from every nation" collections popular in the early twentieth century, where national identity is signalled by a handful of details rather than any deep regional cooking. What marks this one Belgian is chiefly the treatment: butter rather than oil, a bouquet of bay, parsley and thyme, and the peas served alongside in the French manner, all of which reflect the Franco-Flemish kitchen as Anglo-American writers understood it. Lamb dressed with lemon juice before roasting is often said to have been a common trick of the era, the rationale traditionally given being that it tempered the strong flavour of older mutton, which was still widely sold and considerably more assertive than the young lamb in shops today. The flour dredge is older still, a standard nineteenth-century method for producing a browned surface and a thickened pan gravy in a single operation, before separately made sauces became the expectation.